What stops someone from picking up an unattended robot mower?
Light enough to carry and left alone for hours, a robot mower has an alarm, a lock and sometimes a tracker. Each behaves differently once it leaves your lawn.
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A Husqvarna Automower 440 iQweighs 39 pounds. A Worx Landroid Lweighs less than that before its battery goes in. Either one spends hours alone on a lawn, often in view of the street, and nothing holds it down but its own weight.
So what happens when someone picks one up? Makers protect the machine in three ways. An alarm and a lock act on the mower itself. A satellite position fix, which many mowers already carry for navigation, records where it is. A data connection sends that position to your phone. Carried off in someone else’s car, the three behave very differently.
What the mower does when it is lifted
Lift a Segway Navimow for a few seconds with its lift alarm on, and “it instantly starts the alarm and sends a notification to the connected devices.” The siren “will ring continuously unless you clear it by entering a special PIN code you have set.”
Mammotion’s mowers pair the same two defenses: a PIN needed “to start or restart the mower,” and an audible alarm when the mower is lifted or tilted. Enter the wrong PIN on a Navimow too many times and “the mower locks down, rendering it inoperable.”
Husqvarna adds a check that needs no network at all. Its GeoFence alarm “acts as a virtual fence” of a set radius. Carry the mower past it and an alarm starts on the mower, which then goes into sleep mode or turns off. The alarm “does not require Wi-Fi or mobile connectivity to function.”
So a stolen mower turns loud and useless to whoever is holding it. But neither the siren nor the lock brings it home. That takes two more things: a record of where the mower is, and a way to send that record to your phone.
The antenna already knows where it is
A mower that works without a boundary wire usually steers by satellite. An RTK GNSS receiver on its body fixes its position to within a few centimeters so it can follow a mapped lawn. The receiver keeps working when the blades stop. As long as it has power, it can tell where the mower is after it leaves the lawn.
A mower that follows a buried wire needs no satellite receiver to do its job. The Landroid L ships with 820 feet of boundary wire. To track one, Worx sells Find My Landroid, a separate GPS and cellular module that fits the WR155 and four other Landroid models.
Term
GNSS and GPSGNSS is the general name for satellite positioning systems, and GPS is one of them. The GPS in a tracking module and the RTK GNSS receiver a wire-free mower steers by both take their position from satellites. RTK adds a correction from a base station or a network service, which is what makes the fix precise enough to follow a mapped lawn.The position still has to reach you. Husqvarna says GPS tracking “requires network connectivity (Wi-Fi or mobile),” and “for Wi-Fi connected mowers, GPS tracking on the map will only work within Wi-Fi coverage range.” So a Wi-Fi-only mower carried past the edge of your network still has its position fix and no way to send it.
Who pays for the connection
Once the mower has left the yard, that network is cellular, and each maker handles the bill differently. Husqvarna builds it in. The 410 iQ and 440 iQ come with cellular connectivity beside the alarm, the PIN code, GeoFence and “GPS theft tracking,” and no data fee is named.
Mammotion includes a 4G module with most of the mowers its 4G service terms cover, then bills for the data after a free period. A lot rides on that link: “timed operations, start/stop/end operations, battery power query, progress query, operation map query, anti-theft function (location query), FPV yard monitoring.”
How long the free data lasts depends on the model, from three years on the LUBA 3 AWD down to one month on the LUBA mini AWD. After that, you buy renewals that attach to the mower by serial number, at $19.90 for three months.
Mammotion 4G service
Free cellular data by model
| Mower | Free 4G data period |
|---|---|
| LUBA 3 AWD | Three years |
| LUBA 2 AWD X | One year |
| LUBA mini AWD | One month |
| YUKA mini 2 | 4G module sold separately |
Segway splits it by model. The Navimow H2 and other “latest and advanced mowers” have 4G built in, while in the budget models “you need to install Navimow Access+ to enable the anti-theft feature.”
Access+ is a 4G module with its own SIM card, optional on the Navimow i Series. The X3 series carries built-in GPS tracking plus “a dedicated item tracker slot.” Built in or added, the data is metered, and the free part runs out.
The usage of cellular data will incur charges. Initially, there is a free period. After that, you need to recharge your 4G data plan via the app.
Worx sells tracking as a module plus a plan. Find My Landroid “notifies you via the Landroid mobile app if Landroid has been removed from its mowing area,” and lets you lock the mower from the app. It comes with a year of cellular service, and renewals start at $29.99 for one year.
The Landroid Vision Cloud WR320promises “24/7 anti-theft protection with continuous monitoring” and a mower you can find from the app after it leaves the property, even switched off. Yet its listed connections are Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and RadioLink. In Europe, Worx sells a Find My Landroid module for Vision Cloud models that promises the same tracking with the power off.
So what stops someone? Nothing on these mowers keeps one on the ground. The siren and the PIN lock need no plan at all, because they work on the mower itself. Getting it back takes a position fix and a data connection. Husqvarna names no fee for that connection; Mammotion, Segway and Worx bill for it once the free period ends.
Picture a LUBA mini AWD lifted off a lawn after its free month has run out. It still wails, and it still refuses to start without its PIN. But the location query rides on that 4G plan, and unless someone renewed it, your phone never learns where the mower went.
