Watch BEFORE You Buy a Robotic Lawnmower - LIDAR is a GAME CHANGER!

I really wanted to love robotic lawnmowers, but after using, testing, and troubleshooting these six mowers for the last three months, that is not how I feel about the majority of them.

So, before we get into anything else, let's talk very realistically about what robotic lawnmowers can and can't do in 2025.

And as a reminder, there are no sponsored reviews on this channel.

First and foremost, unlike a traditional lawn mower 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 of your grass.

And what that means is that if you're used to 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 actually generate any lift. So everything on the ground will stay on the ground and only things that are above the cutting height of the blade will actually 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 your robotic lawn mower is going to leave at least a few inches 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 can do it all almost completely silently, allowing you to mow at basically any time of day.

So, with those limitations understood, if you still want a robotic lawn mower, here are some important choices that you need to make to get the right one to work for your yard.

And the most important thing is choosing a navigation type.

And in 2025, the majority of robotic lawnmowers that you see are going to use GPS with a technology that's called RTK.

And in this video, the GPS-based robots are the Husqvarna Auto 410 IQ, the Sunseeker X3 Plus, the Mimotion Luba Mini 2, and the Mimotion Yuka Mini. And as I said, 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's a network of satellites in orbit.

And each one continuously transmits a signal containing its location and the exact time that that signal was sent. And then on Earth, a GPS receiver can pick up one of 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 location extremely accurately given perfect conditions.

But as we know, conditions in real life are almost never perfect.

And things like slight time synchronization errors on the satellites and minuscule changes in the speed of light through cloud cover can cause a GPS receiver to miscalculate its location by several meters, which obviously isn't acceptable for a robotic lawnmower.

So to correct for those conditions, GPS-based mowers use an RTK base station that stays in 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.

And because an RTK antenna never moves, it knows its real position in your yard. And then it knows exactly how far off its calculated GPS position is.

So it can send that correction data over to the mower and drastically improve its accuracy down to about 1 or 2 cm.

However, all the magic of RTK depends not only on the mower itself having a strong GPS signal, but also having an RTK antenna that can see the exact 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. And 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 second story roof and mounted all four RTK bases where they could have a completely unobstructed view of the entire sky.

And amazingly, that still wasn't enough.

And the Mimotion robots would finish the setup process, but constantly get lost while mowing my yard. And the Sun Seeker and Husvarna mowers wouldn't even complete the setup process. And then I learned about GPS reflections and that the space in between my house and my neighbor's house where I originally had set the charging bases up is basically a Bermuda triangle for GPS-based mowers because it not only limits which satellites the mowers can see, but also the signal gets reflected off of the walls and the windows of the house, which causes the mowers to have an additional delay that the RTK antenna doesn't.

So after the RTK antenna sends correction data, the mower thinks it knows exactly where it is when it's actually not even close to that.

And for me, the biggest improvement came from moving each of the GPS mowers charging stations into the front of my yard, which is not an ideal location, but it did allow me to finally complete the setup process.

But even then, they all struggled.

And 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 for your yard, look around your property and know that large trees with dense canopies and two-story houses are an absolute recipe for disaster.

So, if you don't go with GPS, the next navigation system that's starting to become more common uses cameras and computer vision. And in this video, I've got the UI E15, which is based off of tech from the startup company Terramo, which uses a front-facing camera to map your yard and do positioning.

And the major upside of 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.

And the first one is speed.

Because in order to locate itself, the E-15 needs to find a certain number of visual landmarks.

So, it will occasionally need to spin around in circles in your yard and move to different locations until it is confident in its positioning before it even starts mowing. Second, because the Yuthi is using RGB cameras to navigate, it needs sufficient light to mow.

So unlike the GPSbased robots that can mow at night, the Yuthi won't start mowing 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 trade-off with the Yuthi is in the mapping process.

Because in contrast to the GPS-based mowers where you manually drive the robot around your yard to define boundaries and no-go zones, the UI process is fully automated and it drives around and uses its camera to find the edges of your yard and identify any obstacles like flower beds, which sounds like a great thing, but it also means that if you have an adjoining yard with a neighbor, there's no way to easily keep the Yuthi out of their yard during the mapping process.

And if you have a lawn with bear patches, the Yuthi will identify those as flower beds. So, you'll need to go back into the app afterwards and mark those as areas that it actually is supposed to mow. And if it doesn't properly identify an area like a flower bed, you'll need to make a no-go zone.

But the app currently only supports square no-go zones. So, you'll need to get creative for more complex shapes.

And overall, the app is definitely still a work in progress. And a few of these pain points already actually have solutions on their development road map.

But in this video, I'm going to review what's available right now.

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 LAR navigation system on the EVAX GoAT A3000 that uses both a spinning 3D LAR mounted to the top of the mower and also a front-facing laser system with a camera for object avoidance, cliff sensing, and edge sensing.

And compared to the other navigation methods, this thing just works.

And it combines all the upsides of a GPS mower, like manual boundary mapping, free form no-go zones, nearly instant positioning, and even nighttime mowing with all the freedom and convenience of a vision-based system like no RTK antenna. The freedom to put the charging base anywhere you want.

No worries about GPS signal dropouts, and it even has an automatic mapping option just like the Yuthi if you'd rather use that feature.

And from what I can tell, the only possible downside that I've heard about LiDAR is that it is a new enough tech that some people are skeptical about how long it's going to last when exposed to the elements.

But in that case, only time is going to tell.

And right now, based on performance, ease of setup, and positioning accuracy, the Eavax Goat A3000's LAR navigation system is just miles ahead of the rest of these mowers, especially if your property has GPS signal issues.

So, after you've made the big decision of a navigation type that's going to 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.

Starting with their range, each of these robots lists a 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 all day every single day, even a robot mower meant for a smaller yard can handle a pretty big area by returning to its base station and recharging multiple times throughout the day.

So, to test their real mowing capacity, I sent each robot out to mow my neighbors 7200 foot lawn, which is about 0.16 acres or 670 square meters, which is well 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.

And starting with the worst performer, the Yui E-15 has a recommended mowing size of 800 m or 0.2 acres. But in Florida in May, I started the Yuthi as soon as it would let me in the morning at 7:30 a.m.

And it mowed until it automatically returned before sunset at 7:00 p.m.

for a total of 11 hours and 30 minutes total task time.

But in that time, it was only able to mow 408.9 m, which is 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.

And unfortunately, right now, there's no option in the app to just continue the job the next day.

So, I'm going to call this one a did not finish.

The Sunseeker X3 Plus says that 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 and over again.

And I honestly feel pretty bad for how much damage the Sunseeker did to my neighbor's yard 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 its base station to recharge.

The longest completed mowing time came from the Mimotion Yuka Mini, which claims to support 0.17 acres, which I found out is just the maximum area that you can map into a single zone.

And in this test, the Yuka Mini completed its mowing in 12 hours and 13 minutes total, and it did not get stuck a single time. The Husqvarna automower 410 IQ has a recommended yard size of 0.5 acres, but it took a total of exactly 8 hours to complete 0.16 acres.

So that 0.5 acre size is likely based off of a 24-hour runtime.

And the Husvarna also never got stuck.

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

And the Eavax 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 a recharge.

So a slightly smaller yard would have been considerably faster.

And even a larger yard around 1,000 m would probably have been done in under 5 hours total.

Next, I tested their mowing speed in a considerably smaller patch of yard at just 1,200 square ft, which is 0.03 03 acres or 112 m. And the Mimosa Yuka Mini still wasn't able to complete that task on a single charge, stopping to go back to the base after an 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 UI E-15 completed the smaller area in 2 hours and 14 minutes using 75% of its battery.

The Mimotion Luba 2 Mini mode for 1 hour and 40 minutes and used 61% of its battery.

The Husqvarno was about twice as fast as that, finishing in 50 minutes using 37% of its battery. And the Eavax Goat A3000 was considerably faster than that, mowing the 12,200 ft in 33 minutes using just 22% of its battery. And in this test, the Sunseeker X3 got a did not finish again because I finally sent it back to its dock after it got stuck four separate 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. And as you can probably tell, the Sunseeker X3 was significantly more likely to get stuck than the other mowers. And I've got close to a hundred 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, which easily then digs into the ground, anchoring it while it spins its relatively small 7-in wheels.

The UI E-15 has 8-in wheels and rear wheel drive, but it does have a single front caster wheel that makes it slightly more likely to tip when it's going over rough terrain, which can then cause one of its wheels to dig and one of them to float.

The Motion Yuka Mini also has 8-in wheels and rear wheel drive, but having two casters in the front helped it navigate uneven terrain without getting stuck as often as the Yuthi, which was still not that often. The Eavax Goat A3000 has 9-in wheels and dual casters.

And it never got stuck during normal mowing tasks, probably due to its slightly longer wheelbase, but it did struggle in my torture testing, and it was able to navigate the wood chip pile, but immediately sunk into the loose leaves.

The Husqvarna 410 IQ has an even longer wheelbase with 12-in wheels, which makes it a little bit clumsy when driving.

And while soft sand and wood chips were absolutely no problem for the Husqvarna, it was no match for those loose leaves.

And the Mimotion Luba 2 Mini's four-wheel drive system in extra wide 6 and 1/2 in rear wheels let it navigate basically any terrain without getting stuck.

And it was the only mower to complete the loose leaf torture test.

And it did so easily.

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.

And that brings me to what is ultimately the biggest downside of the more frequent mowing of these robotic mowers, and that's that they can cause damage and ruting 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 Motion app specifically has an option for the robots to do a multi-point turn in order to lessen the damage to the yard.

But even with that option enabled, the Lubetu Mini absolutely destroyed the grass in front of its charger.

And it still 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 UI E-15's wheels are not particularly damaging on their own, but because the vision system detects the bare patches of your yard as obstacles, it ends up turning in place significantly more than the other mowers.

So, even though each turn isn't bad, the number of turns means that the Yuthi damages your yard more than most.

And when moving from one mowing area to another through what's called a pathway or a corridor, the Yuthi always travels over the exact same area, which can also end up causing damage.

The Sunseeker 7-in 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 Eavax Goat A3000 seemed like it should have been more damaging to the lawn since it has huge treads on its wheels, and it spins pretty 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 bear patch in front of its charging station, but after reviewing some footage, that damage was actually made earlier by the Luba 2 Mini.

And lawn damage, or lack thereof, is another instance where the Husqvarna's giant 12-in wheels really shine. And it did almost no damage to the lawn, despite having a very strict and consistent docking routine.

However, the large size of the Husq Varna isn't always a strength.

And I measured the distance between the cutting disc and the outside of the wheel, which represents the least amount of uncut grass border that the robots could possibly leave.

And the Husq Varna had the largest gap of 6 and 12 in from the side of the wheel to the cutting blade.

And that is quite a lot considering it's also the most clumsy navigator and the least able to hug walls, fences, and curbs. And of the other robots, which were all considerably smaller and more nimble, the Luba 2 Mini had 5 in between the cutting blade and the outside of the wheel, the Yuka Mini had 4 1/2 in, the Sunseeker had 4 in, the Yuthi had 3 and 1/2 in, and the Eavax Goat A3000 had just 3 in between the cutting blade and the wheel.

And I wouldn't call that zero edge like they advertise, but it allowed it to leave the smallest uncut border out of the 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 LAR system instead of just relying on your manually drawn borders.

And as I mentioned, the Husqvarna was definitely 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 the other robots use camera systems for visual object avoidance.

And to test the effectiveness of those systems, I put out a football and this tiny realistic stuffed dog.

And I sent each mower out on an area mow.

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

The most conservative object avoidance was from the UI E-15, which took 36 minutes to mow while navigating around the two obstacles, but it never touched the football and only gave a slight nudge to the puppy.

The Motion Luba 2 Mini also had an excellent performance, completing the mowing task in 29 minutes, again with just a slight tap of the puppy and no contact with the football at all. The Yuka Mini slightly misjudged its own width and nearly ran over the dog's head, but it did properly avoid the football for all 24 minutes of its mowing task. Despite having dual front-facing cameras, the Sunseeker X3 Plus ran head first into the puppy, only getting stopped by its bumper bar.

And then it proceeded to push the puppy around a little bit more before attempting to return to its charger, but getting stuck on the edge of the driveway instead.

And 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 the puppy multiple times, but thankfully, it didn't run them over completely like I was worried about.

I also spent quite a bit of time exploring each of these robots apps.

And the best one in my opinion is the Motion app, which easily lets you create schedules per zone that get executed at specific times.

And it 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 in.

And the same options were available for the yukam mini except for cut height which needs to be changed manually on the robot but it is adjustable between 2 and 3 and 1/2 in. The Husqvarna app is also very customizable and has options per zone for cutting height between 1 and 4 in cutting pattern and direction and scheduling.

But the scheduling is kind of weird since you just set a range of times that it would be okay to mow that area of the yard. And those times are allowed to overlap with other schedules of other areas. And it's not clear how or why the app chooses to mow one area over another. But to its credit, it did seem to do a good job of keeping all the grass at a consistent height.

Like the Husvarna app, the Sunseeker app also allows for movement speed, cutting density, and cutting direction per zone. And the scheduling feature also work fine.

But the Sunseeker has a manual dial for cutting height that's just labeled 1 through 9.

So if you're looking to cut your lawn to a specific height, that's going to require a little bit of trial and error.

The Eavax app also gives options for speed, cutting heights between 1.2 2 and 3.5 in 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 Motion and Husvarna apps.

But scheduling was very easy to use and it gives you a pretty accurate start and end time per zone.

And as I mentioned before, the Yuthi app is definitely still a work in progress.

And at this point, I would 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 the scheduling options are also just global, meaning you can't set up the UI to cut a specific area of your lawn at a specific time.

And even more annoying than that, if you've mapped an area of your lawn, there is no way to tell the UI not to mow that area using scheduling.

And the last option worth considering is the wireless connectivity of each robot.

because depending on how large your yard is, you may not have perfect Wi-Fi coverage in every area. So, if your mower gets stuck, you would never know without going out to check on it.

And for those instances, having an LTE cellular connection is very useful.

And for these six robots, the Husqvarna comes with an included LTE connection to the Husvarna Cloud, which allows it to communicate from anywhere and also includes anti- theft GPS tracking as long as the mower is powered on.

The Mimotion Luba 2 Mini comes with an LTE module installed, but the LTE service is subscriptionbased and will cost you about $50 per year. And the Yuka Mini can also use that same LTE service plan, but it does require you to purchase a $129 add-on LTE module. The Eavax Goat A3000 also has an add-on LTE module that's currently available in Europe and is expected to go on sale in the US sometime in May or June 2025 for around $200.

The UI E15 also 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 that switch currently doesn't do anything. But you can read about future plans for cellular connectivity in their frequently asked question section.

And 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 this thing is getting stuck anyways.

So, in conclusion, without question, the Eavax Goat A3000 lidar is very significantly better than the rest of these mowers.

It's easier and more flexible to set up. It's faster, has a bigger battery, better object avoidance, better edge mowing, it can mow during the day and at night. It has no issues with GPS signal dropout. And all this feels very familiar to when the first LiDAR robotic vacuums hit the market and basically revolutionized the industry.

With a price of $26.99, the Eavax is quite a bit more expensive than the next best option, which is the Mimotion Luba 2 Mini at $15.99. But I would venture to say that the Eavax 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 the RTK antenna and still suffered from GPS dropouts after that. The Yuka Mini performed decently other than its very small battery, and it is $500 less than the Luba, but I personally think that the Luba's four-wheel drive system is easily worth the $500 increase in price, especially since the Luba also has a significantly better battery life and a built-in LTE module. I wanted to love the UI E15 for the ease of setup and vision-based navigation, but the app is just not ready, and currently it has fewer features than the Terramo app that the UI is based off of.

So, that combined with a much lower range and the inability to mow at night makes the $15.99 price tag way too much for what you're getting.

The Husqvarna Auto 410 IQ is honestly fine. And if you just blindly bought it without researching what else was on the market, you'd probably be happy with it, assuming that you had decent GPS signal in your yard because those big 12-in wheels and giant overall size means that it very rarely gets stuck.

And the app is pretty good.

But compared to the other mowers, it's definitely clumsy.

And at $2,999, it is both the most expensive option in the video and the one with the least modern technology. And last, the Sunseeker X3 Plus is the same price as the Motion 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 completed a handful of jobs without getting stuck.

And it is not something I would feel even remotely comfortable setting up on a schedule to work autonomously.

As I said before, there are no sponsored reviews on this channel, but I do have links down in the description for all the robots.

And if this video was helpful for you to 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 all of 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 down in the description.

If you enjoyed this video, please consider subscribing.

And as always, thanks for watching the Hookup.