I recently moved to a house with a lot of land. As much as I love the ritual of mowing, trimming and maintaining nearly five acres of cleared land and over an acre of lawn, I simply don’t have the time to do so week in and week out.

After six weeks with a Mammotion LUBA 2 AWD robot lawn mower, my hopes for a set-it-and-forget-it experience have been crushed. But this should be taken as a “what you need to know before buying a robot lawn mower,” not an altogether rejection of the concept.

Not All Lawns Are Created Equal

Andrew Martonik / How-To Geek

I should be the target audience for a robot lawn mower (or a landscaping service, perhaps). And so, I took up Mammotion on an offer to review the LUBA 2 AWD 10000HX robot lawn mower. It has a whole litany of features, including GPS and 4G, an AI-powered vision system for object avoidance, two height-adjustable cutting disks, trick wheels with all-wheel drive to handle hills, and enough battery capacity to mow over an acre in one shot. And yes, I can feel the question bubbling up—this model costs $4,500, with lesser models starting at $2,600 (Amazon only stocks the 1.25 acre variant for “only” $2,999). Even though they’re often discounted, that’s a heck of a lot of money.

I knew I was setting up the Mammotion LUBA 2 for a tough go of things with my lawn. I have about an acre to mow, broken up into three distinct areas: a back lawn, front lawn, and an extension off the front lawn down to a clearing and pond. Each area has its own potential difficulties, and the list is long, including: trees, stone steps, a flower bed, drip rockery around the house, a home generator, an AC unit, and varying hilly terrain. Beyond that, my lawn isn’t defined by a fence, curbs or pavers, but instead high grasses and brush. This is like a test course you’d set up to see how a robot lawn mower would handle a variety of conditions.

To my surprise, the LUBA 2 AWD actually handled these obstacles well. The all-wheel drive system with trick sliding wheels lets the mower take tight turns, and the vision system avoids obstacles very well. Despite my initial concerns about cutting power from relatively small blades, it mowed evenly and kept my grass tidy—albeit higher than I’d like it to be and certainly higher than the height setting claimed (the 2-inch setting cut like my other mower set to 3 inches).

Andrew Martonik / How-To Geek

I knew this mower wouldn’t be perfect or the only maintenance my yard would ever need. I was just hoping that it would be good enough to save me from hours of monotonous mowing every week. For nearly two months it’s been doing the middle 90% of dull back-and-forth mowing on wide swaths of my lawn every couple of days to keep it in generally good shape. When I have time on a random afternoon or weekend, I finish up the finer points with my walking mower and trimmer. It smartly varies its pattern each time, will double-mow patterns (if you have a smaller lawn), and trims the perimeter last for a very clean look.

With this much lawn, though, it’s pretty much always mowing. Is that a problem? No, not really. But it starts to show the limitations of having a robot mower for this large a lawn. It takes about 6 hours to mow one of my lawn areas (1/3 of an acre, or 14,000 sqft), more often than not requiring a recharge in the middle. With three zones of this size, we’re talking about mowing a section every single day in order to keep everything short, and when you factor in the mower smartly skipping mowing on rainy days, I’m certainly pushing the limits of what it’s capable of maintaining.

Funny enough, it does mow in the dark and has lights to help with object avoidance and keep critters away, though it needs to slow down so much it’s really only useful for finishing off jobs rather than doing your whole lawn while you sleep.

Less Time Mowing, More Time Babysitting

Andrew Martonik / How-To Geek

I won’t dive into the extensive hassles I had with the setup process, because much of it may have been my (false) assumption that it would be plug-and-play. Beyond that, there’s much more frustration to come in the daily use of the thing. But I’d say the biggest issue came with the mapping, charging, and reference station setup.

Unless you have a fully enclosed or clearly marked lawn (like a fenced backyard), you need to do a full manual GPS mapping of your mowing areas before you can start, including mapping paths between the charging station and each area. Oh, and there’s no way to edit a map. If you want to make a change, you have to start over from scratch. That’s a lot of walking around when you have this much lawn to cover. As I found out the hard way, if you get part of the way through a mapping session and the robot loses GPS or connection to the reference station, you’re starting over again.

Andrew Martonik / How-To Geek

The LUBA 2 is also particularly picky about where you place the charger and its associated reference station—a 5-foot tall pole with a large white beacon at the top that relays your home internet out to the robot. You need to get both far enough away from the house that the reference station can talk to the robot (including on the other side of your house, hopefully) but also so the robot can actually use GPS to find its charger. You’re tethered to the house because both need power—thankfully, the included cable is quite long—and you’re trying to find an area that is at least somewhat inconspicuous. This isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing piece of equipment to have stationed by my garage.

Perhaps I was naive in thinking that after I went through the arduous setup process, things would just work from there, but they most certainly did not work. While I completely stand by my assertion that the LUBA 2 AWD is a capable robot mower and handled my immense lawn with its many obstacles, the amount of babysitting and fiddling with it required in order for it to do so is beyond frustrating.

It was a rare occurrence that the mower made it through a full mow without a GPS positioning fault. Despite living in a rural, wide-open area with no buildings and moderate-height trees on a relatively flat piece of land. Most of the time it’d pause with a GPS fault and resume several minutes later. The GPS faults were most frustrating when it came to the mower finishing its mow and being unable to find its charger, or even finding its charger and then claiming the charger had moved, requiring me to remap its location and pathways to the mowing areas.

In one instance, it was so confused about where the charger was it got stuck and broke off one of its own protective side guards on the charger.

Andrew Martonik / How-To Geek

The mower would also lose and then “find” GPS, only to resume its mowing on a different grid than it was previously, leaving a big awkward triangle or multi-foot gap of unmowed grass. Or, and this happened multiple times, losing GPS while mowing the edges of a lawn area and finding itself tangled in high grass or wrapped around a bush, causing the battery to drain overnight, for me to go find it stuck like a drunk frat kid as the sun rose the next morning. The latest big GPS fault unfortunately, happened on its second mow while I was on a two-week vacation, leaving me to return to a woefully overgrown lawn I spent days taming upon my return.

It all added up to a really frustrating experience. While yes, it saved me hours of time on my feet mowing every week, I often spent about half of that time saved monitoring, tweaking, and stubbornly carrying around the robot to get back on task and actually complete a mow. A net positive, for sure, but as someone who would rather “just get it done” and has a real perfectionist mindset, this doesn’t work so well for me.

The Future of Lawn Mowing Is Here, It’s Just Not Ready Yet

Andrew Martonik / How-To Geek

I put my experience with the LUBA 2 AWD robot mower into three distinct buckets. There are issues that are limitations inherent to a robot lawn mower, there are issues with this robot lawn mower, and there are issues that are highly dependent on the size and style of your lawn.

I’ve come to terms with the typical limitations of robot lawn mowers. I don’t expect any of them to perfectly edge my lawn, cut as low as a walking mower, mow tight around every obstacle, or mow quickly. There’s serious utility and value in a robot mower even with these caveats. And I’m certain that the LUBA 2, despite its flaws, handles a lot of these situations better than lesser mowers without the all-wheel drive, battery capacity, vision system, or large dual cutting discs.

But the LUBA 2 AWD brings its own unique set of issues, many of which are tough to get past. At this price, I find the GPS error rate to be far too high. And for a supposedly advanced AI-powered vision system, it really shouldn’t hit any obstacles, ever—let alone multi-foot tall ones.

Andrew Martonik / How-To Geek

The amount of work required to get the LUBA 2 AWD working properly on a weekly basis cuts substantially into the amount of time it saves me mowing, and its issues and quirks add up to the point where I’m not sure I could recommend it—at least, for anyone that has a large and variable lawn like I do. The regular GPS drop-offs, far-from-perfect object avoidance, and struggles with lawns not defined by curbs or fences are enough to give me pause. That pause gets longer when I consider the price—again, the LUBA 2 AWD ranges from $2,600 to $4,500.

With the right (much simpler) lawn setup, and for anyone who’s already paying for a lawn care service, this could easily get you ahead cost-wise, and save you hours on your feet mowing wide swaths of grass. If you’re willing to lower your expectations of having a perfect lawn and deal with some finicky quirks, give one a try.