Robot lawn mower designs vary wildly, as they're optimized for different benefits, and for every feature, a weakness is exposed. Light and fast robots are easy to turn over. Heavy robots are slow and get stuck. Every single robot lawn mower I test seems to be built differently, optimized for stability or tight turns or longevity or agility, but never all of the above. In this way, robot lawnmowers are very different from robot vacuums—it’s less about which is the best robot, and more about what robot is best for your yard. The Segway Navimow i110n ($1299, but the smaller model is $979.99) is a useful little bot with an appealing design, tight turn radius, small footprint and relatively easy-to-use app. It struggles with irregular landscapes and doesn’t get as close to obstacles as I would like. Still, if you’re willing to do a little yard amendment to make it work, the Navimow is a good choice for a mid-priced robot lawn mower.
Easy to put together
The Navimow comes mostly put together right out of the box. Unlike the Mammotion 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 garage, an additional purchase that I recommend (it protects your investment from the elements as well as thieves), was also quick to come together. The most confusing part was the navigation tower, which you install atop an included pole. You can, alternatively, mount it on your home, and the instructions weren’t helpful distinguishing the parts of the house mount and the pole from one another. The dock, mower, garage and GPS tower are all relatively lightweight.
Segway goes to great lengths in their app and documents to offer direction on how to install the tower and the bot, because like a number of other bots, the tower and bot always need to be in sight of one another, and the tower also needs to have line of sight to the sky. If you have a front and back yard, you’ll likely need to mount the pole on your home to maintain the line of sight to the bot at all times, which means the bot and tower will be in two different places. There are plenty of cords given to do so, but it’s much, much easier when you can install them both in one place. Once in place, I struggled to pair the Navimow to the app for about 30 minutes—the app just couldn’t find the robot—but eventually it did pair, and the app has been consistent since then.
Prefers a level lawn
The Navimow sets boundaries in a way I enjoy, like the Mammotion Luba 2. 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. You can set “no go” zones, but in this yard, the only no go zones were some raised beds that the mower couldn’t possibly harm. You can follow the area the Navimow is mapping in the app in real time, seeing the position and precisely how much space has been covered, a feature I really liked. Almost immediately, though, the Navimow became stuck in a dip in the lawn. It wasn’t a ditch or a sizable hole, but rather a shallow depression, about two feet wide, a few inches deep. 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. For the next few mows, the bot avoided the area as soon as it sensed the depression was still there. It did the same with a slight hill elsewhere in the yard. Again, this wasn’t a dramatic hill, but a slight raise over 18 inches, no more than a little bump. But still, the Navimow decided it was a hazard and avoided it, leaving an obviously un-mowed bump. We shaved down the hill—no more than a single shovel scoop—and then relocated that soil to the depression and leveled it out. The mower then started mowing those areas on the next run, but I was surprised it was bothered by them to begin with.
No lawn tracks, but predictable cutting
Unlike other bots where you can set the height of the cut lawn in the app, you set it manually on top of the lawnbot itself—which means you’re less likely to adjust it once it is set. The Navimow does a respectable job mowing, dutifully going back and forth in a predictable pattern after first circling the area. Because of the lightness of the robot, I never achieved the lawn lines that so many people aspire to, regardless of how long the grass was beforehand or how short we cut it. Also, the finished lawn, although clearly mowed, did not have the tidy look provided by a heavier mower like the Luba 2. The lawn was always dotted with a few missed pieces of grass here and there. And while an occasional stray piece of grown grass isn’t a big deal, it did affect the final look.
Improves over time
For the first few weeks, I was unimpressed with how much space the Navimow gave those raised beds. The boxes were sturdy and made of all straight lines, I assumed the bot would bump up against them and cut pretty close. Instead, the Navimow avoided them altogether, leaving an eight- to 10-inch path around them that required some string trimming. 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.
Some features are buried
Navimow's app offers many of the same features as other lawn robots, including scheduling, reports, anti-theft protection and options for conditions under which the mower will go out: rain, darkness, etc. What it did less well than other robots was help create multi-zone maps. Most lawns, I’ve found, are going to require more than one zone. You’d likely make your front and back yards two zones, and connect them, or you might have a strip of lawn between your sidewalk and the street. 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. Once I solved the gradation problem, the Navimow never got stuck again while mowing a zone, and I was able to send it on scheduled runs without worrying about it over the six weeks of testing. During those six weeks, we never once had to mow manually, although we did clean up the edges with a string trimmer.
Bottom line: well-priced for smaller spaces
I ran this test at the same time as the Mammotion Luba 2, so it’s easy to compare them. For instance, the Luba does not struggle with difficult terrain, and the Navimow could not possibly have managed the same obstacles as the Luba. But the Navimow can navigate far smaller spaces than the Luba. In spaces the Luba could barely get into, the Navimow zipped in, mowed and got out without tearing it up. While the Navimow doesn’t leave lawn tracks due to the lightness of the body, the wheels also don’t tear up the lawn making tight turns like the Luba did in those spaces. The finished result isn’t as clean-looking, but the lawn was mowed. The Navimow is also less than half the price of the Luba. If you’ve got a lawn under ¼ acre, the Navimow makes a lot of sense. For $1300 or less, you take one household labor off the to-do list, and that amortizes pretty quickly when you consider the time mowing takes or the money you’d pay a service. I do recommend the additional garage; the mower lights up like a light tower at night, and the garage does help mask the lights a bit. I also recommend mounting the GPS tower to your home for best line of sight to the robot at all times, and to make sure your lawn is mostly level. Still, if you’re willing to put in a little work up front, the Segway Navimow i110n is going to get the work done for you.