Mammotion Luba Mini AWD 800 Review

Design & Features

Designed to be as rugged as possible to cope with uneven terrain, lawn boundaries, and even little steps, the Luba Mini AWD 800 is an unstoppable force in the garden. It’s similar to the larger Mammotion Luba 2 AWD, but designed for smaller spaces. This,as the name suggests, is the version for gardens up to 800m2, but there’s also a version for larger gardens up to 1500m2.

Styled like a miniature offroad F1 car, you can even buy official Mammotion stickers with go faster stripes on them. Decked out in bright white plastic on top and with a wide bumper on the front, it’s a handsome machine with a good bit of character.

The real improvement that this robot has over most of the competition is four-wheel-drive. Where two-wheel-drive robots (including the Luba’s little brother the Yuka Mini) struggle on soft ground and lumpy lawns, the four chunky tyres provide ultimate traction. 

The “omni” front wheels are cleverly designed to let the mower steer itself around without the annoying shopping-trolley wheels found underneath most robot lawnmowers. In fact, the four-wheel-drive element is what elevates the Luba Mini AWD above the competition. Where other robot mowers struggle, the Luba Mini just gets on with the job. 

Keeping the mower on track and out of the bushes are a pair of AI-enhanced cameras mounted on the top of the unit. These are used to improve navigation and for obstacle detection and avoidance.

Setup was surprisingly easy, thanks to the paper instructions inside the box and the guide found in the app. All I had to do was snap together the charging base, attach the vision module on top of the mower with four screws, hook the robot up to the app via Wi-Fi and follow the rest of the setup instructions. 

Wi-Fi is the easiest way to control the robot, but there’s also 4G onboard, available via a subscription service. If you want to monitor the robot in your garden and don’t have full Wi-Fi coverage it may be worth paying for.

The trickiest job, as with other GPS-based robots, is setting up the RTK station. This fixed reference station needs clear skies above it to get a good signal. There are two ways to mount it: either on a pole stuck in the ground or mounted on a wall with an adjustable bracket. Getting it right can be a challenge if you have overhanging trees or other aerial obstructions. 

Once set up, the robot is ready to map your garden. Mapping out the lawns was more fun than I expected. You can let the Luba find its own way with automatic mapping, but I found it to be a bit slow and overly cautious. Driving the mower around like a remote control car was more accurate and quite enjoyable. I created four separate zones, all linked by pathways and with no-go zones included to avoid damaging delicate plants. 

The cutting deck’s disc holds six blades, and is adjustable in the app between 20mm and 65mm, giving plenty of cutting options. You can just cut all of the grass to one height, but the Mammotion Luba Mini AWD 800 is far more configurable thanks to its zones and some clever tech.

The level of customisation available at every level set Mammotion apart from other robot mower brands that I’ve tested out so far. 

For example, you can decide how the Luba Mini AWD turns around at the end of a lawn. To help avoid chewing up the grass, you can command it to perform a neat three-point turn that would impress the most jaded driving instructor. 

The Luba Mini will even let you choose different cutting patterns and heights for different lawn sections. If you want a 20 mm lawn cut in a chequerboard pattern on your front lawn and a classic striped lawn at 60 mm on the back lawn, it can handle this. And, it’s easy to set schedules to get the robot to cut the lawn automatically.

An additional feature that is certainly not necessary, but a whole lot of fun, is the “3D lawn printing” mode. Packed with a range of in-built shapes and letters, you can command the mower to draw pictures on your lawn or write words.  

The cameras also allow a neat trick- First Person Viewing mode lets you see exactly where the mower is in real time. You could even use it as a mobile security camera when away from home. 

Performance

• Cuts brilliantly
• Handles uneven terrain with ease

To test the Luba Mini AWD 800 thoroughly, I took it to a Devon cottage garden filled with obstacles including a trampoline, shrubs and bushes, and even a stream with steep sides. This mix of terrains and hazards was an ideal place to see how well the robot coped.

The test garden I used for this mower featured several steep slopes that defeated other two-wheel-drive robots. Thanks to its chunky tyres, the Luba has impressive traction without the need for aggressive spikes that churn up soft lawns. 

If there was one drawback of the Luba Mini AWD, is that it’s quite small. The compact size of the mower is great for tight spots and awkward corners, but the cut width of just 20cm means it has to make more passes on larger lawns. 

During testing, the Luba did a good job of avoiding obstacles on the grass. Rather than stopping, it recognised objects like garden furniture and discarded children’s toys from a short distance away and navigated around them. 

Apart from a run-in with a bark-filled trampoline pit, where the Luba got stuck for a while, this robot did a good job of staying out of trouble. Thanks to its off-road capabilities, it was able to rescue itself when learning the finer points of the test garden, leaving the grass evenly cut.

Should you buy it?