He’s such a good boy! 🐶 🤖. The lat

est addition to our household, Marvin the mower, has done an impressive job so far. It’s a Mammotion Tech Luba 2 3000 robot mower, from Robotech Australia.

I just tell Marvin to mow a particular area of our yard, and off it toddles, looking like Wall-E, to do its job. It’s fully automatic, detecting obstacles, returning to charge when necessary, and sending me a notification when finished.

Hardware setup was pretty easy. Plug in the camera eyes, position the recharging pad, assemble the transmitter pole and stab it into the ground. More detail on our hardware setup in our previous post: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/v9veusE28yA1CqL3/

The RTK transmitter pole needs to have fairly clear view of the sky, but seems to work fine where I put it, with some light nearby vegetation.

To program the yard mowing areas, I tapped in the app to add an area, then remote controlled the mower around the area boundary, while walking beside it. Francis laughed, took a photo, saying I looked like a lone lonely loner walking his dog. When I returned Marvin to the starting point, it added the area. I broke up our yard into about six areas. I added a couple of no go zones (in yellow on the map) for large garden beds. Smaller obstacles, like trees and the clothes line, the mower just detected and mowed around them. I added a connecting pathway down our driveway to the front roadside large strip of grass. I even added a heart shape “lawn art” pattern to try it out.

The precision is super impressive. The transmitter is in our back yard. When Marvin mows the front yard, 100m away on the other side of our house outside of our wifi range, it maintains centimetre accuracy.

The biggest and only real problem I had was during setup. The software just kept saying “Positioning”. I walked the robot around to map the yard, not realising that it wasn’t mapping, until the end. In desperation, I wondered if the RTK (transmitter pole) was obstructed from viewing parts of the sky (to position with GPS satellites), so I moved the whole base station ten meters away. No improvement. I eventually realised that I had to get it to update the firmware of the RTK transmitter to match the mower. After that, it all worked seamlessly.

It did get stuck once on the leg of a lawn chair.

The app UI is pretty good. A few weirdly worded things like a button labelled “Understand”. It labels the mower and the transmitter both as a “robot”, which is confusing. It took me a while to figure out how to navigate to the map scene.

Marvin speaks when starting or stopping an operation. When it says “resume mowing” it pronounces the first word incorrectly as “resume-ay“ in its Jarvis like English accent.

I figure it will pay for itself after about a year of mowing, compared to hiring someone to do it. The mowed lawn should be much better quality since I can mow it often and consistently.

A few people have asked if it has a catcher. No. The Luba models don’t have a catcher. They just mulch the clippings to fall back into the ground. Our last couple of paid mower services did the same thing. It works fine for us. Mammotion also offers a new “Yuka” model that has a catcher and automatically empties it where you designate. But it has a smaller mowing area rating.

Similar to an EV (car), I don’t have to go to a fuel station to get petrol, subject my family to the carcinogenic fumes or noise. It takes a while for the mower to “refuel” (from our solar provided electricity), but it takes far less human time, because I don’t have to hold the pump.

And maybe best of all, I can do the mowing in bare feet, without risk! 😉