Guides

Many wire-free robot mowers ship with a separate piece of positioning hardware that has to be installed somewhere sensible. Here is what it is for, and which models we track say they require one.

A handful of facts about your own yard will narrow the field of robot mowers considerably. Collect them before you start comparing models.

If your lawn comes in more than one piece, multi-zone support decides whether a robot mower handles the whole property on its own or only the part you put it in.

Robot mowers use several different positioning technologies, often in combination. Here is what each one does, and what the manufacturers of the models we track say they use.

Runtime and charging figures are published for most robot mowers. Turning them into "how much gets mown per day" is where things go wrong.

Heavy tree cover is a genuine consideration for robot mowers that depend on satellite positioning. Here is why, what manufacturers say about it, and why we will not rank models on it.

Coverage ratings look like the simplest number on a robot mower spec sheet. They are not all measuring the same thing, and manufacturers attach qualifiers that are easy to miss.

Slope is one of the most misread numbers on a robot mower spec sheet — partly because of the units, and partly because some manufacturers publish two separate ratings for the same machine.

The same robot mower is sometimes given different specifications on different pages of the same manufacturer's website. Here is how often we have found it, and how to read a spec sheet with that in mind.

"Wire-free" does not mean "nothing to install". Here is what each boundary system asks of you, and what the manufacturers of the models we track actually publish about their requirements.