Anker’s lifestyle brand Eufy has already swallowed a big chunk of the and now it’s got its sights on your yard. The company has been sharing details of its first two robot mowers since the start of the year, and now they’re ready to start selling them. Eufy’s E15 and E18 are designed to automate one of the most tedious jobs around the home — if you’re able to pay. I’ve been testing an E15 for the last few weeks ahead of their retail debut today and I’m fairly impressed.
Early robot mowers needed a boundary wire to tell them where they were allowed to mow. But digging a trench around your lawn is time consuming, costly and less than ideal if you eventually move. It prompted companies to pivot to other methods, such as GPS or RTK (real time kinematics) to navigate. Eufy, however, is harnessing its computer vision know-how to trim your lawn with even less fuss, calling its technology “visual full self-driving,” or vFSD. Yes, I know. Anker says there are plenty of benefits in using cameras over GPS, like more reliable mowing and better obstacle avoidance.
The E15 is capable of covering lawns up to 800 square meters while the E18 will conquer lands as broad as 1,200 square meters. If you assumed, like I did, that the difference between the two is battery size, you’ll be mistaken — both have the same 4,200mAh battery, but the E18 has more on-board memory to accommodate a bigger map size. Otherwise, they are the same machine, with an adjustable cutting height between 25 – 75mm, a maximum climb of 18 degrees and a combined GPS / 4G anti-theft system. One feature I’m very partial to is that the garage (the mower’s charging station) comes with a rain cover, meaning fewer worries if you’re out and the weather suddenly gets a bit intense. Not that it’s necessary, since the hardware is rated IPX6 — enough to withstand being cleaned with a hose.
Setting up the E15 is painless so long as your lawn is nicely mown, with the grass no taller than 3.5 inches. All you’ll need to do is fix the garage in place with some hefty ground screws, hook it up to power and connect it to your home’s Wi-Fi. Then all you’ll need to do is send it out for one or two mapping runs in order for it to get a sense of your space.
My lawn is cut into a hill, with a sunken pathway and a 1.5 meter drop at one end, which is a problem. Since it maps visually, I opted to babysit the mower during the process to make sure it didn’t hurl itself into the chasm. I also have a small lean-to wood shed with a green roof (at the bottom of the chasm) that I reckoned a computer vision system could easily mistake for grass, so I wanted to keep an eye on it. Once it had made a few too many furtive advances toward that roof, I paused the mapping, sent the E15 back to its garage and set up a keep out zone in the app before finishing the job.
Once that was done, however, the E15 very easily staked out the rest of the space and made sure it could get nicely close to the path without going over. From there, you’re doing everything of note within the app. You can set the cutting height as low as 25mm or as high as 75mm, and can also set the unit’s movement and cutting speed — letting you use more power if you’re pressed for time. Plus, you can schedule mows, and if the device detects rain or too much wet in the grass, it’ll head back to base until things have dried out.
One feature I’m a big fan of is that it’s the first such machine I’ve encountered that lets you set a cutting direction for stripes. It’s not that I have an issue with most robomowers’ chaotic mowing per se, but I’ve always seen striped lawns as desirable. While the unit isn’t going to give you the sort of over-manicured, inch-perfect stripes you’d find at a tennis club, you can at least see the contrast.
An additional benefit of remote control is that if it does run into an issue and you’re not at home, you can activate a remote control mode. Not only are you able to access the camera feed, but you can trigger on-screen controls to navigate out of any tricky spots it might have wound up in.
It’s funny, but something I didn’t notice, but my in-laws did when they visited, was how shockingly quiet the E15 was. When I set the hardware running to satisfy their curiosity, they were baffled that the thing was scuttling around on the lawn making almost no noise whatsoever. It’s certainly a perk, especially if you choose to set this thing off for a scheduled trim in the early morning — it’s quiet enough that even the ants probably won’t complain.
All in all, I like the package Eufy is offering, and it even handled some of my misgivings about its computer vision system. If I have gripes, it’s not really about the E-series at all and more about this category of product generally. For a start, robot mowers may not get every square inch of your lawn, especially if some of your edges neighbor deep crevasses, like mine. That means you’ll still need to go out there every once in a while with a weed wacker to trim the borders of your turf.
And I’d still love nothing more than to be able to exert more control over the initial mapping phase to eliminate some of the trial and error. I wish for a system that would let me use my phone as a tool to trace the outside edge of a space myself, to set some basic expectations. Sure, the hardware would still have to scuttle around making sure it can get where I need it to go, but it’d save some of the busywork for both of us.
The Eufy E15 (800 sqm) and E18 (1,200 sqm) are available to order today from Eufy and Amazon. The E15 will set you back $1,599, while E18 is priced at $1,999.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/eufys-new-robot-mowers-use-smart-vision-to-trim-your-grass-130008542.html?src=rss
