Mammotion Yuka Mini 800

Introduction

While a flagship, high-end robot lawn mower may seem like the right bit of kit, a lot of us have relatively flat, simple gardens that don’t pose a challenge. If your garden is like that, then the Mammotion Yuka Mini 800 could be for you.

Design & Features

• Solid build
• Manual cutting height adjustment
• Powerful app

The Mammotion Yuka Mini 800 is designed for smaller gardens. As the name suggests, it’s capable of mowing lawns up to 800m2, although there’s a smaller version for 600m2 gardens.

This is a slightly more budget-friendly robot lawn mower than the company’s Luba 2 AWD, which has all-wheel drive for tough terrain. If your garden is relatively flat and simple, the Mammotion Yuka Mini 800 is probably a better choice (not to mention cheaper).

Unlike some of the competition, such as the Sunseeker V3, the Mammotion Yuka Mini 800 needs a bit more set-up as it uses GPS for positioning, rather than vision only. Vision-only robots are good in smaller, neatly defined spaces, but GPS is better if you need to thoroughly map your garden.

First impressions of the Yuka Mini 800 are good. It’s a compact little mower with a grey plastic top case, a few buttons and a dial on top, and two aggressive knobbly tyres on the back. 

Designed to withstand almost any weather, it has IPX6 water and dust protection, but a water sensor on top will send it back to its docking station should the rain start during a mowing task. The onboard battery is swappable.

Helping it steer underneath are a pair of shopping trolley style casters. They are large but smooth, allowing the mower to turn around within its own radius. It’s not overly heavy at just of 10 kg, so picking it up to move it isn’t impossible. 

The cutting disc underneath uses five double sided razor-sharp blades to slice a 190 mm swathe through the grass. It will cut grass from 20 – 60 mm, but unlike the more expensive Luba 2 AWD, it’s set by a dial on the top of the mower rather than via the app. 

Other controls found on top of the unit are power on/off, a home button to send it back to the charging dock, a grass button to start mowing, and a big red emergency stop button. Everything else is controlled via the powerful Mammotion app. 

Setting up the mower, via the app, is made as straightforward as possible thanks to the large paper setup guide and plenty of videos found on the app. It’s easy to connect to the robot using Bluetooth, and then it can be hooked up to your Wi-Fi. 4G is also an option via a subscription service.

Everything in the box is neatly laid out and labelled, so it didn’t take long to snap together the charging base and locate the RTK module in a clear space. 

There are two different ways to mount the module, either on a spike or attached to the wall of your house or outbuilding. It comes with quality shield anchors- expanding bolts that make secure fasting a relatively easy process. 

The module needs open sky to operate properly, so I attached it to the provided pole and secured it to the side of a carport with plenty of open air above it. This can be a bit tricky if you have overhanging trees or other obstructions.

Crucially, the RTK module comes with a separate power supply, meaning that you can mount it where you want, it doesn’t need to be connected to the charging dock like some robot mower systems. There’s even an option to do away with the RTK station altogether. The Yuka Mini has an inbuilt NetRTK and 4G module that’s free as a trial, but will need a subscription later.

To map out the lawn, there are two options to choose from. Using its cameras and RTK connection, you can set it to auto-map which works well on basic lawn shapes. But for more complex lawns it becomes a remote control car. Using the app, you drive round the edge of the lawn, then set no-go areas and channels between lawn sections the same way. It’s a lot of fun.   

The app offers plenty in the way of customisation, from setting mowing schedules and patterns to allowing you to watch real time footage through the front facing camera.

As much fun as it is watching the robot trundle across the lawn, it can also be used as a mobile security camera viewable from anywhere with an internet connection. 

Recharging the mower happens at the docking station. It’s a black plastic open construction that you attach to the ground with screws. It’s unobtrusive but doesn’t come with a roof to keep some of the weather off the robot. 

Performance

• Struggles with uneven ground
• Cuts well
• Lots of cutting pattern options

To put the Yuka Mini 800 through its paces, I took it to a classic Devon country cottage garden. Featuring a range of complex lawn shapes, steep slopes, and plenty of obstacles to negotiate, it’s a good test for a robot lawnmower. 

What lets the Yuka Mini (and other two-wheel-drive robot mowers) down is negotiating softer pieces of lawn. The aggressive and rather spiky tyres are excellent for grip but tend to tear up grass, especially when mounting lawn borders.

Another thing that the Yuka Mini can’t do is change cutting heights on the fly. Unlike the Luba AWD, if you want to cut different lawn sections at different heights, you need to turn the dial on the top of the mower. 

There’s an impressive level of customisation available for mowing patterns. You can stick with the standard zigzag pattern, opt for a bowling-green like chequered pattern, or take advantage of a clever adaptive zigzag path mode. This mode divides each lawn into different internal zones to increase efficiency. If you want the mower to perform several boundary cuts before tackling the meat of the lawn, or set it afterwards, you can. 

The pair of cameras on the front recognise a range of obstruction on the lawn, and it does a good job at obstacle avoidance. If something gets in the way of the Yuka Mini, it simply drives around it, without stopping its mowing pattern. 

Over the course of testing, the Yuka only needed a few minor adjustments before it found a mowing rhythm. It mowed in a neat zigzag pattern without leaving tufts of grass behind and didn’t get lost in the bushes or stuck underneath any garden furniture. 

Should you buy it?

FAQs