This lawn mowing robot looks like a racing car but cuts grass beautifully

Key points of ZDNET

• The Mammotion Luba 2 3000H available for $2,499.
• Built to handle uneven terrain, the Luba 2 is an all-wheel drive (AWD) lawn mowing robot with a GPS-assisted perimeter and is surprisingly easy to set up.
• Despite nearly stable performance, Luba 2 went off the map several times during testing. Additionally, the Mammotion app is not user-friendly.

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Mowing the lawn is one of my favorite jobs. It allows me to focus on an uninterrupted task that satisfies my OCD, with the added bonus of completing my exercise circuit. Apple Watch. But even though it’s a job I enjoy, it still takes a few hours off my too-short weekend.

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That’s where Mammotion Luba 2 come in. Imagine the scene: you take your dog for a walk and come home to a perfectly manicured lawn, even though just an hour before it was overgrown. When you’re away, the robot lawn mower not only takes care of the messy grass but also leaves a beautiful checkered pattern behind it. I’m happy to say that this dream has come true with the Luba 2 and while it has its quirks, it still handles the job of mowing the lawn with efficiency and ease.

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When I received the Mammotion Luba 2 for review, the only wireless GPS lawn robot I had used before was EcoFlow blade. As you can read in that reviewSetting up the Blade was terrible, taking up a lot of my Sunday afternoon leading to arguments between my husband and I, and constantly explaining to the kids that no, we won’t be riding the robot around the yard.

This time, the task of setting up the lawn mower fell to my husband on a day when I was not home. I had intended to help him set up when I returned, but I was surprised to find it all finished when I got back. In fact, he had nothing but praise for the Mammotion’s easy setup process, as it was completed in less than two hours — from unboxing to installation and running in the yard.

In contrast, setting up the previous robotic lawn mower, the EcoFlow Blade, was a tedious job for two people because it couldn’t get a good enough signal no matter where we placed the GNSS antenna in the yard. As for the Mammotion Luba 2, we haven’t even put the antenna in the yard yet — it’s still on the deck — but it’s already connected to the lawn mower and working fine.

We were very careful about the placement of the EcoFlow antenna due to signal issues during installation, and here the Luba 2’s antenna connected itself seamlessly from a random location on the deck . If that doesn’t tell you it’s a more advanced RTK-GNSS system then I don’t know what does. I will update my review of the Luba 2 once I have the pole installed permanently, adding Garage (available on pre-orders) and a one-month trial.

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Mapping is easy and quite fun as you just walk behind it, steering it around the yard using your smartphone with the Mammotion app as the remote. Once you complete the mapping process, Luba 2 will automatically cut the route. The app also lets you name the lawnmower, so naturally, I named it Andretti because of its resemblance to a Formula 1 car (and also so I could ask my husband what day it was). Has Andretti finished running yet?

It’s been raining so much lately, the grass is growing like crazy. This rapid growth has kept Andretti’s work in line with it and helped me amass around 20 hours of testing divided into three different areas over the past two weeks.

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During testing, I found the Mammotion Luba 2 capable of navigating uneven terrain without affecting its map. For example, when other robotic lawn mowers slide downhill sideways, this often interrupts their mapping and instead of correcting position, they resume from an incorrect position. This results in patches being missed and the mower being swept out of the coverage area. In my testing, Luba 2 never fell victim to this glitch. Even though it slid down a few times, it always stayed in place and kept the map intact.

Unfortunately, the Mammotion app isn’t very intuitive; Changing settings will require menu searching and trial and error. However, it is loaded with features. You can use the app to change the mowing pattern, from striped to checkered, etc., set up different zones, including no-go zones for pools or garden beds, arrange paths and control Adjust the mowing height.

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When mapping, the perimeter you walk with Luba 2 will be the same as the perimeter when the robot is out mowing the lawn. It’s a bit tricky to walk and steer the robot in a perfectly straight line along the perimeter of your property, so I hope you can straighten the boundaries in the app after creating the map.

That said, I like that the Luba 2 is devilishly consistent when cutting along the perimeter. I could see the robot mowing along curves I had mistakenly created during the mapping process, but almost every time it did it the same way.

Even though the Mammotion Luba 2 looks like the Ferrari of lawn mowers, it still zips around the lawn at its own pace. It’s not slow compared to other lawnmower robots, but don’t expect it to live up to its looks and become a turbo grass tamer.

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My Luba 2 went off course six times during testing. One of those times, it ended up in my neighbor’s yard, which is much less ideal since they are very particular about how they mow it, but this appears to have happened during the positioning process and not not when the blades are inserted, thankfully. Another time, it crashed under the deck and lost signal. It should never have been placed below deck, but I guess it’s taking a shortcut to the mast position (really sorry about that).

You can also manually control the robot in the mowing app on tricky areas where you think it might drift away – which is also a good feature for touching up areas that need it. The Mammotion app also offers first-person view (FPV), so you can check where your robot is at any time if it’s stuck and you’re not there to see it.

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I know these GPS-powered robots make mistakes because this new technology is still being perfected in terms of accuracy, so I usually don’t bother with them. But I found it Mammotion Luba 2 Much less error prone than EcoFlow Blade. I can trust the Andretti so much when following its map that I feel fine letting it mow my fence-free front lawn, even on the side of picky neighbors, which I wouldn’t. Never let Blade do it.

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Finally, I like how quiet the Luba 2 is. One of the strangest things about using a robot lawn mower is that it not only takes care of the lawn itself, but also does it so quietly that you might not even notice it. . Overall, I definitely recommend the Mammotion Luba 2 to anyone looking to spend a few hours sitting out in the grass on the weekend.