A robot lawn mower for all terrain

Verdict

A powerhouse of a robot lawn mower, the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD has an all-wheel drive system that lets it power over rough ground and climb steep slopes. With its huge 400mm cuttiding width, this robot makes short work of even very large areas of lawn. Boundary-free setup and smart navigation can make life easier, although I found it took a bit of fiddling to get everything set up. Once running, this robot provides an exceptional cut.

Introduction

Most robot lawn mowers are rather sedate-looking, but the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD looks like a Formula One car – a Formula One car that can go offroad. It’s a beast of a lawn mower that mows without boundary wire and has a double grass cutting deck for an extra-wide cut.

It’s expensive, but it’s also a fine machine, able to cope with bumpy ground and very large areas, with options for 1000m², 3000m² and 5000m². It is a touch fiddly to set up and get connected, but once running, it will cope with everything.

Design and Features

• All-wheel drive system
• Boundary-free setup
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 4G connections

There are three different versions of the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD available. Functionally and looks-wise, they’re the same, but they’re aimed at different lawns: 1000m² (£2149), 3000m² (£2549) and 5000m² (£2949). Price and size-wise, the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD stacks up against the Stihl iMow 7.

For all three versions, the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD is an absolute beast of a lawn mower, weighing 17kg. It does look cool, like an off-road Formula One car.

Part of the reason that the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD is so big is because it has a 400m cutting width, putting it up there with a regular lawn mower. Rather than a bigger cutting deck, the lawn mower has two underneath, each with three blades that you’ll need to replace occasionally. Having such a large cutting area means that the robot can cover a large area quickly.

It’s also an All-wheel drive (AWD) lawn mower, with each wheel able to turn independently. The rear wheels are wide, chunky models designed to give grip and push.

At the front are the Omi-Wheels, which are a standard wheel made up of a ring of smaller degress mounted at 90-degrees. Similar to the wheels on the Ecoflow Blade, these wheels are designed to allow the robot to turn without damaging the lawn.

With AWD, the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD can handle slopes of up to 45 percent (24°), with a maximum climb of 80 percent (38°), which is absolutely huge, as most robots top out at 30 percent or 40 percent.

In the standard box, you get the lawn mower, the docking station, and the RTK kit. The latter uses an additional remote GPS receiver alongside the one in the lawn mower. The information from both receivers is used to precisely position the robot, eliminating the need for boundary wire.

With the default box, you get a ground mount for the RTK receiver, which comes with a short wire that can be connected to the power output on the docking station. If you have to place the receiver far away from the docking station, there’s an additional power supply in the box. There’s also an optional wall-mount kit, which costs £85.

While the flexibility is nice, a slightly longer cable would have been appreciated, giving a few options of where to place the receiver without using the second power supply.

For the robot itself, there’s a main power supply with a long cable that connects to the base station. By default, the robot is exposed, but there’s a £179 garage available that provides a cover and protects the robot from UV.

Before the robot can be put on charge, there are a couple of maintenance jobs: the 3D Vision camera has to be installed, as does the front bumper. Neither’s a complicated job, and it takes about 20 minutes or so to get the robot installed.

Once ready, it can be docked, which should power it on and start it charging. I say should, as my robot powered on (it has a voice that spoke to say as much), but the LEDs on the side weren’t flashing as they should.

Connecting the robot to the app via Bluetooth, and then connecting it to Wi-Fi, showed the battery on 0% and not charging. I had to take the robot in and out of the dock a few times until it started to charge properly. I think it wasn’t quite making contact, and a few minor adjustments of the dock, before screwing it into place on the lawn, seemed to make the difference and I didn’t have this problem again.

While I stuck with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD does have a SIM card slot, which will take any 4G SIM you want to provide. This can be useful in a very large garden, as it allows you to keep track of the lawn mower even if it’s out of range.

Via the app, your first job is to create a map of your garden. There’s no fancy automatic boundary recognition as with the Segway Navimow i105E, so I manually had to steer the robot around to make the map.

On the first attempt, the robot told me that it had completed mapping, even though I hadn’t finished driving around the boundary. I started again and didn’t run into problems.

As well as a simple map of one lawn, the robot can support up to 10 zones, which you link with a path, allowing for side and front gardens, as well as the rear. And, there are no-go zones, so you can prevent the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD from going where you don’t want it, such as into a pond.

There are a limited set of buttons on the front of the robot for starting and stopping a mowing session, and a big red Stop button you can hit in case of an issue (the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD will also stop if it’s lifted or rolls over).

For more control, you need to use the app, which has a lot of options – many more than most. For a single task, the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD will mow until it has covered the entire map, returning to the dock when it’s done.

For this type of cut, there are options to cut the perimeter only or use your choice of zig-zag, chessboard, or adaptive zigzag path. I guess the choice is nice, but it’s a touch overwhelming to see all of the options, where most robots will just mow in the way that’s best for the lawn.

In addition, there are options to adjust the obstacle detection mode. Direct touch sees the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD bump into objects with its bumper and then move around them. Slow touch is the same thing, only the robot uses its camera to slow down first, before touching with its bumper. Less touch uses the camera to avoid objects. And, No touch does the same thing as Less touch but is even more careful.

I used Less touch, which I found was good enough to avoid garden furniture left out, gently navigating around them. Mammotion recommends that toys and smaller objects be removed before starting to mow.

In the standard mow mode, there’s only an option to change the cutting height once the robot is in motion. A slider adjusts the cutting height between 25mm and 70mm in 5mm increments. That’s good enough for all types of lawn.

As well as starting a task manually, there’s scheduling, which can be done weekly (and you can choose multiple days), on a specific date, or at a fixed interval (X-number of days from a starting date). These scheduling options give the same options as for a standalone mow, but also have the option to adjust cutting height.

Finally, there’s also an option for manual mowing, where you drive the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD where you want it to go. That’s handy if you’ve got a patch of lawn the robot couldn’t reach before, say because a chair was blocking it.

Once the mower is in automatic mode, there’s an option to view the live video feed, which allows you to watch it in real time as it moves around.

Lawn printing is a feature that lets the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD cut patterns or letters into the lawn. It’s a fancy demonstration of technology, even if it’s not something you’d use regularly.

There’s an option in the app to turn off the side lights, but no option to turn off the green indicator lights on the docking station or robot. I opted to cover them up with tape, as they’re distracting to see at night.

Finally, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant support are available for voice control when you want to start or stop a cut.

Performance

• Brilliant navigation
• Powerful cutting
• Deals with tough ground

The Mammotion Luba 2 AWD is an exceptionally powerful and clever robot lawn mower. My lawn has lots of divots where the cats dig up the garden, which can trap some lawn mowers, causing their wheels to spin, digging bigger holes. Not so with the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD, which just drives straight through such things, it’s that powerful.

The navigation is also smart. While the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD looks like a powerful monster, it slows down as it approaches objects and the boundary, neatly mowing up to them, before turning and moving on again.

Its dual cutting decks make short work of grass. Even after having quite a few straggly bits of lawn with longer clumps of grass, after no-mow May, the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD cut through them easily.

As with other robot lawn mowers the small clippings mulch into the lawn, feeding and improving it.

Should it rain, then the onboard rain sensor is activated, and the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD will stay in its dock until conditions are suitable for it to mow again.

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An incredible bit of engineering, the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD is particularly suited to very large gardens and those with steep slopes and rough ground.

If you have a complicated layout, or lots of trees that may block the GPS signal, the rival Stihl iMOW 7, which uses boundary wire, might be a better choice; and, that model is supported by a large network of dealers that can help with regular maintenance and issues, which may be an important consideration at this kind of price. And, for smaller gardens, the Segway Navimow i105E is a cheaper and simpler robot.