Robotic Lawnmowers – LIDAR is a GAME CHANGER!

May 14, 2025

I really wanted to love robotic lawnmowers, but after using, testing, and troubleshooting these six mowers for the last three months, that’s not how I feel about the majority of them. So, before we get into anything else let’s talk realistically about what robotic lawnmowers can and can’t do in 2025. As a reminder there are no sponsored reviews on this channel.

Robotic Mower Limitations

First and foremost, unlike a traditional lawnmower with a big loud engine and mulching blades, these robotic lawnmowers use tiny little razor blades attached to a cutting wheel to trim just the top centimeter or two off your grass. What that means is that if you’re used to just running your mower over yard debris like leaves and small sticks to mulch them back into your lawn, these robots absolutely can’t do that, and their cutting wheels don’t generate any lift so everything on the ground will stay on the ground. Only things that are above the cutting height of the blades will get touched.

Second, the small cutting wheels are inset from the sides of the mower and the drive wheels are on the outside. So, if your grass has any kind of border like a curb, a fence, or even just a small garden wall, that means that the mowing blades can’t get to those areas and the mower will leave at least a few centimeters of uncut grass that you’ll need to clean up later with a string trimmer.

In other words, if you were hoping that one of these robots could replace an entire lawn crew to cut, edge, and blow out your yard, that’s just not something that they can do yet. However, what they can do is mow your lawn much more frequently than you normally would and they can use their precise navigation systems to cut perfectly straight and neat lawn stripes, and because there’s no mulching blade, they do all of that almost completely silently, allowing you to mow at basically any time of day.

So, with those limitations understood, if you still want a robotic lawnmower, there are a few important choices you need to make to get the right one to work for your yard, and the most important one is choosing a navigation type.

Navigation Types – GPS + RTK

In 2025 most robotic mowers use GPS with a technology called RTK and in this video the GPS based robots are the Husqvarna Automower 410iQ, the Sunseeker X3 Plus, the Mammotion Luba 2 Mini, and the Mammotion Yuka Mini. Going with a GPS based robot is going to give you the most choices in terms of models and budget ranges, but for me in my small Florida yard, GPS basically didn’t work at all, and here’s why.

You may know that the basic concept of GPS is that there is a big network of satellites in orbit and each one continuously transmits a signal containing its location and the exact time the signal was sent, and then on earth a GPS receiver can pick up those signals and calculate how long it took to get to its location from space.

Then, after receiving signals from at least four satellites it can do some math using the speed of light to pinpoint its position extremely accurately given perfect conditions. But conditions in real life are never perfect, and things like slight time synchronization errors on the satellites and miniscule changes in the speed of light through cloud cover can cause the receiver to miscalculate its location by several meters, which obviously wouldn’t be acceptable for a robotic lawnmower.

So, to correct for those conditions GPS based mowers use an RTK base station that stays at a fixed location near your mowing area and an RTK antenna connects to the same satellites as the mower and then calculates its own position using those same signals. Because the RTK antenna never moves, it knows its real position in your yard and exactly how far off its calculated GPS position is, and then it can send that correction data to the mower to drastically improve accuracy down to about 1 cm.

However, the magic of RTK depends not only on the mower itself having a strong GPS signal but having an RTK antenna that can see the same satellites as the mower, so for most people, just putting the RTK antenna on a stick in your yard, like most YouTube videos show, isn’t going to give you very good results. For me in my yard, none of the four GPS based mowers would even complete their setup process with the RTK station staked in the ground. So, to give each mower the best chance possible, I got on my 2nd story roof and mounted all four of the RTK bases where they have a completely unobstructed view of the entire sky, and amazingly that still wasn’t enough. The Mammotion robots would finish the setup process but constantly get lost while mowing, and the Sunseeker and Husqvarna mowers wouldn’t even complete their setup process.

And then I learned about GPS reflections and that the space in between my house and my neighbor’s house where I had originally setup the charging stations is basically a Bermuda triangle for GPS mowers, because it not only limits which satellites the mowers can see, but the signal also gets reflected off the walls and windows of houses, which causes the mowers to have an additional delay that the RTK antenna doesn’t. So, after the RTK antenna sends the correction data the mower thinks it knows exactly where it is, when it’s actually not even close.

The biggest improvement came from moving each of the GPS mower’s charging stations into the front of my yard, which allowed me to finally complete the setup process, but they all still struggled. Thankfully, my neighbor let me use his yard with much less tree cover for my testing so I could give the GPS robots a fair shot. But, before you consider GPS, look around your property and know that large trees with dense canopies and two story houses are a recipe for disaster.

Navigation Types – Computer Vision

The next navigation system that’s starting to become more common uses a camera and computer vision. In this video I’ve got the eufy E15, which is based off tech from the startup company TerraMow, which uses a front facing camera to map your yard and do positioning. The major upsides to a vision based mower is that things like trees and buildings have no effect on its ability to navigate, there’s no need to climb onto your roof to install an RTK antenna, and there are no limitations to where you can place the charging station, but there are some drawbacks. The first is speed because in order to locate itself the E15 needs to find a certain number of visual landmarks, so it will occasionally spin around in circles, moving around your yard until it is confident in its position before it starts mowing.

Second, because the eufy is using RGB cameras to navigate, it needs sufficient light to mow, so unlike a GPS based robot that can mow at night, the eufy won’t start moving unless it’s at least 30 minutes after sunrise and it will automatically go back to its base 30 minutes before sunset.

And the last tradeoff is in the mapping process because in contrast to GPS mowers where you manually drive the robot around your yard to define the boundaries and no-go zones, the eufy is a fully automated system where it uses its camera to find the edges of your yard and identifies any obstacles like flower beds. That may sound like a good thing, but that also means that if you have an adjoining yard with a neighbor there’s no easy way to keep the eufy out of their yard during the mapping process. If you have a lawn with bare patches the eufy will identify those as flower beds, so you’ll need to go back into the map afterwards to mark those as areas that it should mow. If it doesn’t properly identify a flower bed you’ll need to make no-go zones, but the app currently only supports square no go zones, so you’ll need to get creative for more complex shapes. Overall, the app is definitely still a work in progress, and a few of these pain points already have solutions on their development road map, but I’m reviewing what’s available now.

Navigation Types – LIDAR

And last, the most recent type of navigation technology coming to robotic mowers, and by far the most effective in my testing has been the LIDAR navigation on the ECOVACS GOAT A3000 that uses both a spinning 3D LIDAR mounted to the top of the mower, and also a front facing LIDAR system and camera for object avoidance, cliff sensing, and edge sensing. Compared to the other navigation methods the thing just works and combines all of the upsides of a GPS mower like manual boundary mapping, freeform no-go zones, nearly instant positioning, and even night time mowing, with all of the freedom and convenience features of a vision based system like no RTK antenna, the freedom to put the charging base wherever you want, no worries of GPS signal dropouts. It even has an automatic mapping option just like the eufy if you’d rather use that feature, and from what I can tell the only possible negative I’ve heard about LIDAR is that it’s a new enough tech that some people are skeptical about how long it will be able to last when exposed to the elements. In that case only time will tell and right now based on performance, ease of setup, and positioning accuracy, the ECOVACS GOAT A3000’s LIDAR navigation system is just miles ahead of the rest of these mowers, especially if your property has GPS signal issues.

After you’ve decided on a navigation type that will work for your specific property, all the other features on these robots are pretty similar, so now it’s time to test their actual performance.

Range Performance

Starting with their range, each robot lists the maximum area of lawn that it’s ideally designed to cover based on battery capacity, but since there’s nothing stopping these robots from mowing every single day, even a robot meant for a smaller yard can handle a pretty big area by returning to its base station and recharging multiple times during a single mowing session. 

To test their real mowing capacity I sent each robot out to mow my neighbor’s 7200 square foot lawn, which is about 0.16 acres, or 670 square meters, which is within the stated capacity of all the mowers in this video, but despite that none of them were able to complete the task without recharging, so I recorded the total mowing time including recharges for each mower.

Starting with the worst performer, the eufy E15 has a recommended mowing size of 800 square meters, or 0.2 acres, but in Florida in May I started the eufy as soon as it would let me in the morning at 7:30 AM, and it mowed until it automatically returned before sunset at 7:00 PM for a total of 11 hours and 30 minutes total task time, but in that time it was only able to mow 408.9 square meters, roughly half of its stated mowing size, and of those 11 hours and 30 minutes it spent 7 hours mowing and 4 hours and 30 minutes charging. Unfortunately, there is no option in the app to continue the job the next day, so I’m going to call this a did not finish.

The Sunseeker X3 Plus says it can mow 0.3 acres but that didn’t matter because after an entire week of attempts the Sunseeker X3 Plus was never able to mow the entire yard without getting stuck over and over again. I honestly feel bad for how much damage the Sunseeker did to my neighbor’s lawn as it endlessly spun its wheels, so I’m definitely also giving the Sunseeker a did not finish score, but it was able to finish roughly 60% of the yard before returning to the base to recharge.

The longest completed mowing time came from the Mammotion Yuka Mini, which claims to support up to 0.17 acres, which I found out is just the maximum that you can map into a single zone, and in this test the Yuka Mini completed mowing in 12 hours and 13 minutes total and didn’t get stuck a single time.

The Husqvarna Automower 410iQ has a recommended yard size of 0.5 acres but took a total of exactly 8 hours to complete 0.16 acres, so the 0.5 acre size is likely based off a 24 hour runtime, and the Husqvarna also never got stuck.

The Mammotion Luba Mini has a listed range of 0.25 acres and took a total of 7 hours and 40 minutes to complete the mowing task, never getting stuck.

The Ecovacs GOAT A3000 has the largest listed mowing capacity at 0.75 acres and it completed the task twice as fast as the second place mower in just 3 hours and 40 minutes, and it was 80% done before it needed to recharge, so a slightly smaller yard would have been considerably faster, and even a larger yard around 1000 square meters would have been done under 5 hours total, and the Ecovacs A3000 also never got stuck.

Speed Testing

Next, I tested their mowing speed on a considerably smaller patch of yard at just 1200 square feet, which is 0.03 acres or 112 square meters. The Mammotion Yuka Mini still wasn’t able to complete the task in a single charge, stopping to go back to the base after 1 hour and 46 minutes with 13% of its battery remaining, and fully completing the task after 3 hours and 1 minute, using a total of 124% of its battery.

The eufy E15 completed the smaller area in 2 hours and 14 minutes using 75% of its battery.

The Mammotion Luba 2 Mini mowed for 1 hour and 40 minutes using 61% of its battery.

The Husqvarna was about twice as fast as that, finishing in 50 minutes using 37% of its battery.

And the Ecovacs GOAT A3000 was considerably faster than that mowing 1200 square feet in 33 minutes using just 22% of its battery.

In this test the Sunseeker X3 got a did not finish again because I sent it back to its dock after it got stuck four different times throughout the mowing task, and to add insult to injury it also got stuck one more time when trying to return to its dock.

Terrain Handling

As you can tell the Sunseeker X3 was significantly more likely to get stuck than the other mowers and I’ve got close to 100 short videos on my phone of the Sunseeker getting stuck over the last few months, mostly due to its front-wheel drive system that makes it front heavy, but also because it has very little clearance for its front bumper bar which easily digs into the ground, anchoring it while the robot spins its relatively small 7 inch wheels. 

The eufy E15 has 8 inch wheels and rear-wheel drive, but its single front caster wheel makes it more likely to tip when going over rough terrain, which could then cause one of its wheels to dig and one to float.

The Mammotion Yuka Mini also has 8 inch wheels and rear-wheel drive, but having two casters in the front helped it navigate uneven terrain without getting stuck as often as the eufy, which was still not that often.

The Ecovacs GOAT A3000 has 9 inch wheels and dual casters and never got stuck during normal mowing tasks, probably due to its slightly longer wheelbase, but it did struggle in my torture testing, and was able to navigate the wood chip pile, but immediately sunk into the loose leaves.

The Husqvarna 410iQ has an even longer wheelbase with 12 inch wheels, which makes it a bit clumsy when driving, and while soft sand and wood chips were absolutely no problem for the Husqvarna, it was no match for the loose leaves.

The Mammotion Luba 2 Mini’s four-wheel drive system and extra wide 6.5” rear wheels let it navigate basically any terrain without getting stuck and it was the only mower to complete the loose leaf torture test, but that four-wheel drive system combined with its short wheelbase, and overall heavier weight made the Luba 2 Mini pretty hard on the lawn during turns.

Lawn Damage

That brings me to the biggest downside of the more frequent mowing of robotic mowers, and that’s that they can cause damage and rutting in your yard as they turn around, and it’s especially common for them to destroy the grass directly in front of their recharging stations as they go through their alignment routine.

The Mammotion app specifically has an option for the robots to do a multi-point turn in order to lessen damage to the yard, but even with that option enabled the Luba 2 Mini absolutely destroyed the grass in front if its charger, and occasionally spun around in circles while mowing, creating large ruts in the grass, but the Yuka Mini seemed to be much less damaging both during mowing and docking.

The eufy E15’s wheels are not particularly damaging on their own, but because the vision system detects bare patches of yard as obstacles it ends up turning in place significantly more than any of the other mowers. So, even though each turn isn’t as bad, the number of turns means the eufy damages the yard more than most, and when moving from one mowing area to another through a corridor the eufy always travels over the exact same area which also ends up causing damage.

The Sunseeker’s wheels aren’t a problem, and it had almost no damage in front of its charging dock, but when it starts getting stuck, which is a lot, it just burrows into the ground by spinning its wheels leaving two big holes on either side of it.

The Ecovacs GOAT A3000 seemed like it should have been more damaging to the lawn, since it has huge treads on its wheels and spins abruptly when it’s at the end of each mowing path, but from what I could see it didn’t seem to cause any damage, and I thought it might have been leaving a bare patch in front of its charging station, but after reviewing some footage, that damage was actually made by the Luba 2 Mini.

Lawn damage is another instance where the Husqvarna’s giant 12” wheels really shine, and it did almost no damage to the lawn, despite having a very strict and consistent docking routine.

Edge Mowing

However, the large size of the Husqvarna isn’t always a strength, and I measured the distance between the cutting disk and the outside of the wheel, which represents the least amount of uncut grass border that the robots could possibly leave, and the Husqvarna had the largest gap of 6.5” from the side of the wheel to the cutting blade, which is a lot considering it is also the most clumsy navigator and is least able to hug walls, fences, and curbs.

Of the other robots which are all considerably smaller and more nimble, the Luba 2 Mini had 5” between the cutting blade and the outside of the wheel, the Yuka Mini had 4.5”, the Sunseeker had 4”, the eufy had 3.5” and the Ecovacs GOAT A3000 had just 3 inches between the cutting blade and wheel, which isn’t “Zero Edge” like they advertise, but it allowed it to leave the smallest uncut border out of these six robots, and it also has options in the app for edge behavior that allow it to get as close as possible to an edge using its LIDAR system instead of just relying on your manually drawn path.

Object Avoidance

I mentioned that the Husqvarna was clumsy compared to these other robots, and that’s because it relies completely on GPS and a bump sensor to do all of its navigation, while all the other robots use camera systems for visual object avoidance, and to test their effectiveness I put out a football and this tiny realistic stuffed dog and sent each mower out on an area mow.

And, as is becoming a bit of a theme in this video, the Ecovacs GOAT A3000 was not only the fastest completing the entire task in under 11 minutes, but it was also the only mower to completely avoid touching both the football and puppy, despite getting insanely close to both of them.

The most conservative object avoidance was from the eufy E15, which took 36 minutes to mow while navigating around the two obstacles, but never touched the football, and only gave a slight nudge to the puppy.

The Mammotion Luba 2 Mini also performed excellently, completing the mowing task in 29 minutes, again with just a slight tap of the puppy and no contact with the football.

The Yuka Mini slightly misjudged its width and nearly ran over the dog’s head, but did properly avoid the football for all 24 minutes of its mowing task.

Despite having dual front facing cameras, the Sunseeker X3 Plus ran headfirst into the puppy, only getting stopped by its bumper bar, and then proceeded to push the puppy around a little more before attempting to return to its charger but getting stuck on the edge of the driveway instead.

As I mentioned, the Husqvarna has virtually no object avoidance ability and only relies on a bump sensor, so it ran directly into the football and puppy multiple times but thankfully didn’t run them over completely like I was worried about.

Phone Apps

I also spent quite a bit of time exploring the robots’ apps, and the best one in my opinion is the Mammotion app, which easily lets you create schedules per zone that get executed at specific times and lets you customize things like speed, cut direction and pattern, perimeter mowing, and cutting height for the Luba 2 Mini which has a motorized cutting deck that can adjust between 2.2 and 3.9 inches. The same options are available on the Yuka Mini except for cut height which needs to be manually changed on the robot but is adjustable between 2 and 3.5 inches.

The Husqvarna app is also very customizable and has options per zone for cutting height between 1 and 4 inches, cutting pattern and direction, and scheduling but the scheduling is kind of weird since you set a range of times when it is okay to mow that area of the lawn, and those times can overlap with the schedules of other areas and it’s not clear how or why the app chooses to mow one area over another, but it did seem to do a good job of keeping all the grass a consistent height.

Like the Husqvarna app, the Sunseeker app allows for movement speed, cutting density, and cutting direction per zone, and the scheduling feature worked fine, but the Sunseeker has a manual dial for cutting height that’s just labeled 1-9, so if you’re looking to cut your lawn to a specific height it will require some trial and error.

The Ecovacs app also gives options for speed, cutting heights between 1.2 and 3.5”, and even object avoidance modes per zone, but unfortunately cut direction and edge behavior are global options, so you have a little less customizability than you do with the Mammotion and Husqvarna apps, but scheduling is easy to use and gives you pretty accurate start and end times per zone.

As I mentioned before, the eufy app is still a work in progress and at this point I’d call it insufficient. Not only does it lack per zone options, and all the cutting height, direction, and behavior options are global, but the most annoying thing is that all the scheduling options are also global, meaning you can’t set the eufy up to cut a specific area of your lawn on a specific day, and even more annoyingly, if you’ve mapped an area there’s no way to tell the eufy not to mow that area using scheduling.

LTE Connectivity

The last thing worth considering is the wireless connectivity of each robot because depending on how large your yard is, you may not have WiFi coverage in every area. So, if your mower gets stuck, you’d never know without going out to check on it and for those instances having an LTE cellular connection is useful. For these six robots, the Husqvarna comes with an included LTE connection to the Husqvarna Cloud which allows it to communicate from anywhere and includes Anti-Theft GPS tracking as long as the mower is powered on.

The Mammotion Luba 2 Mini comes with an LTE module installed, but the LTE service is subscription based and will cost you about $50 a year, and the Yuka Mini can use the same LTE service plan but requires you to purchase a $129 add-on LTE module.

The Ecovacs GOAT A3000 also has an addon LTE module that is currently available in Europe and is expected to go on sale in the US sometime in May or June 2025 for around $200.

The eufy E15 has a built in cellular module and a switch to toggle on cellular data in the app, but as I said, the app is very much a work in progress and the switch doesn’t currently do anything. You can read about future plans for cellular data in their frequently asked questions section.

As far as I can tell the Sunseeker X3 Plus doesn’t have and doesn’t plan on having any LTE connectivity, which is probably good since you won’t want to know how often it’s getting stuck anyway.

Conclusions

So, conclusion time. Without question, the ECOVACS GOAT A3000 LIDAR is very significantly better than the rest of these mowers. It’s easier and more flexible to set up, faster, has a bigger battery, better object avoidance, better edge mowing, can mow during the day and at night, and has no issues with GPS signal drop out, and all of this feels very familiar to when the first LIDAR robotic vacuums hit the market and basically revolutionized the industry.

With a price of $2699 the Ecovacs is quite a bit more expensive than the next best option, which is the Mammotion Luba 2 Mini at $1599, but I would venture to say that the ECOVACS is at least twice as good as the Luba 2 Mini in terms of performance and ease of use, especially for someone like me who needed to climb onto my second story roof to install an RTK antenna and still suffered from GPS dropouts.

The Yuka Mini performed decently other than its very small battery and it’s $500 less than the Luba. But I think the Luba’s four-wheel drive system is easily worth the $500 increase in price, especially since the Luba also has significantly better battery life and a built in LTE module.

I wanted to love the eufy E15 for its ease of setup and vision-based navigation, but the app is just not ready and currently has fewer features than the Terramow app that the eufy is based off of. So, that combined with its much lower range and inability to mow at night makes the $1599 price tag too much for what you’re getting.

The Husqvarna Automower 410iQ is fine, and if you just blindly bought it without researching what else was on the market you’d probably be happy with it assuming you had decent GPS signal in your yard because the big 12 inch wheels and giant overall size means it rarely gets stuck and the app is pretty good, but it is clumsy and at $2999 it’s the most expensive option in the video with the least modern technology.

Last, the Sunseeker X3 Plus is the same price as the Mammotion Luba 2 Mini, for a front-wheel drive mower with manual cut height, poor object avoidance, and no cellular connectivity, but the biggest issue is that in the last few months of testing the Sunseeker X3 Plus, it only finished a handful of jobs without getting stuck, and is not something I’d feel even remotely comfortable setting up on a schedule to work autonomously.

As always there are no sponsored reviews on this channel, but I do have links below for all of the robots, and if this video helped you decide which mower was right for you I would appreciate if you use those links since as an Amazon Affiliate I do earn a small commission on the sale at no cost to you. 

I’d also like to thank my awesome patrons over at Patreon for their continued support of my channel, and if you’re interested in supporting my channel please check out the links below. If you enjoyed this video, please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel and as always, thanks for watching The Hook Up.

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