Segway Navimow i105N Robot Lawn Mower Perimeter Wire Free 1/8 Acre RTK+Vision Robotic Lawnmower, AI-Assisted Mapping, Virtual Boundary, APP Control, 58dB(A) Quiet, Multi-Zone Management

This lawn mower robot is a game changer - it an incredible application of the latest tech and engineering to make a chore an afterthought. Is it perfect? No, not at all. Is a giant leap forward? Absolutely.The confluence of GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth, and camera-based AI makes this robot completely different and supremely effective. Using your phone and the robot, you map out the areas of lawn on your property. The robot orients itself with GPS and doesn't miss. IT cuts grass very efficiently, and makes hardly any noise at all. You can run this in the middle of the night and no one would know! The app keeps track of where it is, and you can monitor its progress easily and intuitively. It varies its pattern on every use, and it hits the stragglers it missed on its previous mission.Set up is a less intuitive than it should be, but after some trial and error, you can figure it out easily. I mapped out two areas of lawn that are separated by our house, and it seems to work well. You will have to create "channels" between the areas of lawn that the robot follows. You will have to manually open gates of course, but it makes it from the back to the front reliably. The app reports progress clearly so you are always aware where the mower relative to the complete task.Some things that I hope will improve with OTA updates:You have set up all of your lawn zones as a single task and you cannot do the back and front independently. I have it set up to do my back first and then the front. When it is done with the front, the mower has to enter my back lawn and then make it back to the charger. My charger is set up between the lawns so it would be more efficient for the robot to go directly to the charger without going to the back lawn first.I mistakenly selected the option to map the shortest path to the charger, which made the mower try to go through a brick wall. The camera detected the wall, but then the mower got confused and just couldn't find its way to the charger - it was relatively amusing to see it try, but it was obvious that it wasn't going to succeed. It was not intuitive how to change the channel - I finally discovered that the mower needs to be in the boundary of one of the lawn zones to allow a channel to be selected for a redo. Once I figured this out, it was relatively easy to set up a channel that allows the mower to automatically navigate to the charger.I also found it is better to turn off the camera when navigating a long channel, e.g. the channel from the back lawn to the front lawn. If the camera is on and there is something close to the path (a stray branch from a plant, a planter, etc.), the robot things it needs to assess if it can get around it and then it can do some relatively creative rerouting, sometimes unsuccessfully. Turning off the camera results in it confidently navigating the path to the next zone.If you have to stop and lift the mower due to an obstruction, the app instructs you to press OK and the home button to restart the mower. That doesn't seem to work. It does clear if you put the mower within the boundary of a zone, but the conflicting directions make things somewhat unclear.Overall, I am very comfortable with the machine. For the most part, it does what it says it will do, and is very reliable. I expect it to continue to get better with additional firmware updates, and the positives far outweigh the niggling negatives that I have observed so far. Highly recommended

Update: 08/21/24-I came up with a simple fix for the mower's tendency to dig its nose in and get stuck in shallow divots. I tried buying the new, heavy wheels, and they helped some, but I was still having issues. The fix I'm showing in the pictures is an option that gives the front of the mower a bit more ground clearance and appears to have solved the issue for me. It is completely reversible, and does not harm the mower. The one potential risk is in providing more ground clearance at the front, it is now possible the mower could ride up over a foot, or pet laying in the grass, so perform with caution.1. You will need a 3mm Allen wrench2. Pop the gray plastic cover off the top of the mower. It's held in with tabs and should snap on and off without issue.3. There are four black screws around the front edge of the mower, they hold the front "bumper" on. Unscrew those four screws and the whole bumper simply lifts off (screw the screws back into the holes so they don't get lost).4. Snap the gray plastic cover back on the mower and put it to work.I'm willing to bet that just providing that little extra ground clearance will solve most folks' issues and there won't be a need to spend a hundred bucks on the "heavy" wheels.A little history: this is my second robot mower. I previously owned a Worx Landroid that required burying a boundary wire. That machine worked like an old Roomba and just bounced around the yard, the hope being it would eventually cut everything. It worked ok, but had problems that only grew as it aged so that it was mostly useless by the end of its third season (got constantly "lost" and after returning it to Worx and being told it was fine, and receiving a new base station to no avail, I finally gave up on it).It's with that in mind that I was closely watching Segway's entry into the modern bot-mower segment. Their first edition cut the grass far too short for southern lawns, but this Navimow offers an almost 4" cut height which should allow the lawn to survive the hottest part of the summer.Setup is far and away simpler than the old boundary wire mowers. My only complaint was having to restart the map a couple times because I got into a divot that the mower couldn't back itself out of (and this leads in to my single biggest complaint about the mower in general... more on that shortly). Once setup was complete, it was time to mow.Mowing is a snap. You can either start it manually or set a schedule and let it do its thing. I have the 1/8 acre model mowing the backyard only, and it recorded 404 sq meters of yard. This translates to 1/10th of an acre, so well within the capabilities of the mower. With that in mind, I was a bit surprised that it takes 9+ hours to mow the back yard. This includes three trips back to the charging station (it appears to mow for about 2.5 hours before needing a charge). It does mow in fairly straight lines and interestingly, it mixes it up each time. One day it will mow in lines parallel to the dock, another day it will mow perpendicular to the dock, then at a diagonal one way followed by diagonal the other way. I currently have it set to mow four days a week, as it has an easier time if it hasn't fallen behind.And now the complaint. Your yard needs to be almost putting green smooth. ANY divot, depression or hump can lead to the mower getting stuck. Fortunately, it's pretty determined and it will work to get itself out of a spot, but eventually it will give up and ask for help (and I'm convinced a not insignificant amount of time and juice is spent on this). This issue would be helped greatly if the front wheels were further forward at the corners, and/or the lower lip at the front end was a little higher. Instead, the wheels are tucked back just a little bit behind the nose which means it will hit nose first and dig in just enough to lift the drive wheels up and not be able to back off. My yard is virtually level, with only the shallowest depression here or there, yet it's been stuck multiple times - and if the grass is damp it loses traction even easier.Final verdict: I'm mostly satisfied so far. It still beats mowing the backyard myself, and it will pay for itself in one long mowing season compared to paying someone else. I hope it lasts longer than the old Landroid, and I do wonder if it will receive updates to make it smarter. It'd be nice if, after the last month of mowing it would learn/remember tricky areas and just how much time it actually takes so it could work smarter - but that might be asking too much.