Light and fast robots are easy to turn over.
Heavy robots are slow and get stuck.
It struggles with irregular landscapes and doesnt get as close to obstacles as I would like.
Easy to put together
The Navimow comes mostly put together right out of the box.
Unlike theMammotion Luba 2, this is not a low-to-the-ground bot; it’s rather boxy.
The Navimow features two large front wheels and then smaller wheels that look like office-chair casters.
The most confusing part was the navigation tower, which you install atop an included pole.
The dock, mower, garage and GPS tower are all relatively lightweight.
You walk the robot around the perimeter, using the remote control in the app to set the boundary.
Then the mower goes about mapping everything in that boundary.
Almost immediately, though, the Navimow became stuck in a dip in the lawn.
The Luba 2 had sailed over sizable ditches, but the design was completely different.
Here, the two large wheels and boxiness worked against the bot.
It did the same with a slight hill elsewhere in the yard.
But still, the Navimow decided it was a hazard and avoided it, leaving an obviously un-mowed bump.
The lawn was always dotted with a few missed pieces of grass here and there.
But over the next few weeks, the Navimow started closing in on those boxes, becoming more precise.
By week six, the was very little space left around the boxes.
What it did less well than other robots was help create multi-zone maps.
Most lawns, Ive found, are going to require more than one zone.
The addition of new zones is buried in the app, outside of map management.
I also struggled to make the connections between zones once I had established them.
The mower struggled as well when I asked it to mow multiple zones, using those connections.
Reliable and trustworthy
That said, there was a lot to like about the Navimow.
It was consistent: When I asked it to mow one zone, it did so reliably.
But the Navimow can navigate far smaller spaces than the Luba.
The finished result isnt as clean-looking, but the lawn was mowed.
The Navimow is also less than half the price of the Luba.
If youve got a lawn under 14 acre, the Navimow makes a lot of sense.
