NAVIMOW Segway i105N Robot Lawn Mower Perimeter Wire Free 1/8 Acre RTK+Vision Robotic Lawnmower, AI-Assisted Mapping, Virtual Boundary, APP Control, 58dB(A) Quite, Multi-Zone Management

Update: 08/21/24- I came up with a simple fix for the mower's tendency to dig its nose in and get stuck in shallow divots. I tried buying the new, heavy wheels, and they helped some, but I was still having issues. The fix I'm showing in the pictures is an option that gives the front of the mower a bit more ground clearance and appears to have solved the issue for me. It is completely reversible, and does not harm the mower. The one potential risk is in providing more ground clearance at the front, it is now possible the mower could ride up over a foot, or pet laying in the grass, so perform with caution. 1. You will need a 3mm Allen wrench 2. Pop the gray plastic cover off the top of the mower. It's held in with tabs and should snap on and off without issue. 3. There are four black screws around the front edge of the mower, they hold the front "bumper" on. Unscrew those four screws and the whole bumper simply lifts off (screw the screws back into the holes so they don't get lost). 4. Snap the gray plastic cover back on the mower and put it to work. I'm willing to bet that just providing that little extra ground clearance will solve most folks' issues and there won't be a need to spend a hundred bucks on the "heavy" wheels. A little history: this is my second robot mower. I previously owned a Worx Landroid that required burying a boundary wire. That machine worked like an old Roomba and just bounced around the yard, the hope being it would eventually cut everything. It worked ok, but had problems that only grew as it aged so that it was mostly useless by the end of its third season (got constantly "lost" and after returning it to Worx and being told it was fine, and receiving a new base station to no avail, I finally gave up on it). It's with that in mind that I was closely watching Segway's entry into the modern bot-mower segment. Their first edition cut the grass far too short for southern lawns, but this Navimow offers an almost 4" cut height which should allow the lawn to survive the hottest part of the summer. Setup is far and away simpler than the old boundary wire mowers. My only complaint was having to restart the map a couple times because I got into a divot that the mower couldn't back itself out of (and this leads in to my single biggest complaint about the mower in general... more on that shortly). Once setup was complete, it was time to mow. Mowing is a snap. You can either start it manually or set a schedule and let it do its thing. I have the 1/8 acre model mowing the backyard only, and it recorded 404 sq meters of yard. This translates to 1/10th of an acre, so well within the capabilities of the mower. With that in mind, I was a bit surprised that it takes 9+ hours to mow the back yard. This includes three trips back to the charging station (it appears to mow for about 2.5 hours before needing a charge). It does mow in fairly straight lines and interestingly, it mixes it up each time. One day it will mow in lines parallel to the dock, another day it will mow perpendicular to the dock, then at a diagonal one way followed by diagonal the other way. I currently have it set to mow four days a week, as it has an easier time if it hasn't fallen behind. And now the complaint. Your yard needs to be almost putting green smooth. ANY divot, depression or hump can lead to the mower getting stuck. Fortunately, it's pretty determined and it will work to get itself out of a spot, but eventually it will give up and ask for help (and I'm convinced a not insignificant amount of time and juice is spent on this). This issue would be helped greatly if the front wheels were further forward at the corners, and/or the lower lip at the front end was a little higher. Instead, the wheels are tucked back just a little bit behind the nose which means it will hit nose first and dig in just enough to lift the drive wheels up and not be able to back off. My yard is virtually level, with only the shallowest depression here or there, yet it's been stuck multiple times - and if the grass is damp it loses traction even easier. Final verdict: I'm mostly satisfied so far. It still beats mowing the backyard myself, and it will pay for itself in one long mowing season compared to paying someone else. I hope it lasts longer than the old Landroid, and I do wonder if it will receive updates to make it smarter. It'd be nice if, after the last month of mowing it would learn/remember tricky areas and just how much time it actually takes so it could work smarter - but that might be asking too much.

EXTRA TIP: If you want to mount your antenna on top of a flat surface, and you don't need an extension cord, and you don't want to pay $50 for the official antenna extension kit, try searching Amazon for 'Light Wall and Ceiling Mount with 5/8" Stud and 1/4" Thread'. I happened to already have this item sitting around, and it fits the threads on the antenna perfectly. The only caveat is the that the square shape of the antenna doesn't align with the square base of the mount when fully screwed on. Just cosmetic issue, and in my case you can't even see the antenna without climbing a ladder. UPDATE 2: I am pretty well delighted with this product now. As I mentioned before, Navimow support recommended diabling camera-assisted positioning after my map deleted itself. But I decided to try mapping my yard one more time without disabling that feature, and this time it worked fine! The mower is doing a fantastic job of navigating my yard and I'm so happy I don't have to spend my weekends mowing anymore. There are just a couple of spots where it has trouble due to sloping/uneven ground, but Navimow support is also sending me a couple of free accessories as an apology for the bumpy experience I had initially. Hopefully the off-road tires will improve the unit's traction, but even if I have to hit those two spots manually with the weed whacker, that's not a big deal. I can also confirm that I've been able to map more than 600 square meters of lawn area on the i105N, so it seems they really did raise its map area limit to be the same as the i110N. A very welcome upgrade. I have a theory about what caused my map to disappear the first time. I could be completely wrong, but just in case it's helpful to anyone... When I was setting up the last couple of boundaries right before the map disappeared, I took some fairly long pauses to clear away debris from the edges of the lawn. I'm thinking maybe the camera-assisted positioning video keeps recording even when you aren't moving the unit, and so I ended up with some massive video files, and their sheer size caused the glitch that deleted my map. Sooo, if you want to be on the safe side, maybe try to make sure you get any prep work put of the way before you start mapping a boundary. Overall I think this is clearly the best value among GPS robo-mowers for anyone with a relatively small yard, especially now that it seems to support up to 1200 square meters of grass. If your lawn is closer to the upper end of that range, you might want to consider the i110N, which is still an excellent value compared to most other GPS mowers on the market. But even this i105N seems like it would have no problem covering that area as long as you don't mind it doing so over the course of two or three days. --- UPDATE 1: I've exchanged several emails with Navimow support now. They did a much better job of understanding my problem after that first reply. Unfortunately, they are unable to recover my map, and they have suggested that I try disabling camera-assisted positioning and re-mapping my yard. They seem to think there might be a hardware issue with my particular unit that is causing it to lose the map when processing the camera data. However, they have offered to compensate me for this frustration in a number of possible ways, including free accessories, and/or replacing my unit with an upgraded model to better accommodate the size of my yard. They also informed me that the coverage limit on the i105N (all units, not just mine) has been upgraded to 1200 square meters, the same as the i110N, which is very much appreciated. I've agreed to spend some more time testing my unit to see if disabling camera-assisted positioning fixes the disappearing map issue, and whether the unit is able to navigate my yard without that feature. (I'm somewhat doubtful, because my yard does have some areas with tree coverage, etc.) Then I will report back to support with the results and let them know what sort of compensation would be most helpful. This is all just theoretical for now, so I'm not changing my rating yet, but I will make sure to keep updating this review as the situation progresses. --- INITIAL REVIEW: I'm still holding out hope that this will work out for me, but the experience so far has been rough. Basic installation was relatively straightforward, although I find it irritating that a wall/roof mount for the antenna is a separate purchase, because that's clearly going to be the best option for most people. The real trouble started when I was mapping out my yard. First, I was a couple hours into the process when I decided to set up a "channel" from my lawn back to the dock. This is a requirement if the dock isn't within the mowing area itself. The app briefly and casually instructed me to drive the mower from the mowing area to the front of the dock. However, I drove the mower all the way onto the dock, and it immediately went into charging mode, which apparently deletes any unsaved map changes. So I lost everything I had done up to that point. I was steaming mad, but there was nothing to be done except start over. Seems incredibly silly to just delete the unsaved map without asking, and even sillier to not warn the user about this when explicitly instructing them to drive the mower to the dock during a mapping session. So I started over and eventually mapped out my whole property over the course of a couple days, pausing freauently this time to save my changes. Now, whenever you add a new mowing area to your map and then end the mapping session, the mower asks to return to the dock and process the "VisionFence" data it gathered during the mapping. So after my final edits, I allowed this to happen, and the mower spent the next hour or so processing the data. Well, when I came back and checked the app, my map was completely gone. No sign I ever even started one. Absolutely incredible. This time I reached out to Segway support via chat, and after some brief troubleshooting steps the agent informed me my ticket was being escalated and I should hear back via email within two days. I did not get any kind of automated email confirming that a ticket had been created, but another agent confirned this the following day. Today, two days later, I did get an email response, but it was completely unhelpful, offering instructions on how to get the map to save (which isn't the problem I'm having). In the meantime, I doscovered that after reinstalling the app, my map shows up again, but it disappears as soon as I pair the app with the mower. So I am hopeful that my map still exists somewhere and can be restored by tech support. I replied to the email with a screen recording of this and another explanation of my problem. Now I am waiting again. I will update this review as the situation progresses. The other extremely irritating aspect of this product is the arbitrary, software-imposed limitation on the area that can be mapped out for mowing. I did my best to estimate the size of my actual grass areas before ordering this model, but it appears I was off by a significant amount, so even if my map does get restored I might have to return the unit and order the 1/4 acre version for $300 more. No clue if I'll be able to transfer my map or if that will mean starting from scratch yet again. I get that they want to encourage people to buy the more expensive model, but they should allow the larger battery to speak for itself instead of imposing artificial limitations. This is only going to result in lots of mowers being returned when people discover they have more grass than they thought. Aside from all my complaints, I can say that the mower did work beautifully during the brief time I was able to test it out on part of my yard. There's a small section with an overhanging carport that seems to cause trouble with GPS reception, and for whatever reason the VisionFence is unable to compensate in that spot, but overall it shows a lot of promise. I'm still clinging to hope that these issues will be resolved and I'll finally be free from spending half of every weekend cutting grass.

Update Nov, 2025: Had to reduce this to three stars. Over time it has become obvious how badly this mower does navigating around objects. In wide, open yards it does a pretty good job. But trampoline legs? Swingsets? Forget it. It doesn’t get close to the edges either. It keeps leaving 1-3 feet wide gaps along the fence or around certain objects. It’s like it’s *too* careful and gives everything a ridiculously wide berth. I’m fairly disappointed at this point and not happy with the purchase any more. It needs to have much better navigation features, like perhaps bumpers or more cameras and sensors so that it can more accurately avoid objects without going 1-3 feet away from them and leaving huge patches of uncut grass. Original review: I’ll start off by saying I was hesitant to purchase this. I read a lot of reviews and wasn’t sure this was the mower for me, but I knew I couldn’t deal with another boundary wire situation. Prior to this I had a Worx Landroid for 3 years and it was such a hassle with how much it got stuck and the amount of times it would dig up its own boundary wire and cut it. I decided to give this mower a shot with the reassurance that I had 30 days to return it if I didn’t like it. When I first opened the box, I was overwhelmed with all the wires and pieces it came with. But really, once I figured out what was what, set up was incredibly easy and fast. The only “difficult” part of it was cable management to ensure no wires were down on the ground where the mower will be cutting. I easily found a spot in my yard where there was good GPS signal (side note: the antenna AND the base both have to have good signal, so you can’t have the base go against your house if there’s any overhang from the roof like mine). The robot can actually help you figure out where the best place is by driving around your garden perimeter and showing you on the app a little map with all the good signal points. I got mine set up along my fence line, plugged in the power cord, the antenna, and did the cable management and bam. We were ready to map. You can either have the robot map by itself following your perimeter, or you can drive it around RC car style with the app and map it yourself. Once that was done I had it start mowing immediately and I’m very impressed with how well it did. My yard was slightly overgrown and it got it all down nicely. It can do my entire yard in one charge no problem, too. It took probably two hours or so, so it’s not crazy fast but it’s definitely faster than my old Landroid that just bounced around randomly and left patches everywhere. It did a really good job, and as you can see from the pics it left nice straight lines which I love. So, I think for the price this is a really good value for a non-wire mower, especially if it’s your first one like me!

This lawn mower robot is a game changer - it an incredible application of the latest tech and engineering to make a chore an afterthought. Is it perfect? No, not at all. Is a giant leap forward? Absolutely. The confluence of GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth, and camera-based AI makes this robot completely different and supremely effective. Using your phone and the robot, you map out the areas of lawn on your property. The robot orients itself with GPS and doesn't miss. IT cuts grass very efficiently, and makes hardly any noise at all. You can run this in the middle of the night and no one would know! The app keeps track of where it is, and you can monitor its progress easily and intuitively. It varies its pattern on every use, and it hits the stragglers it missed on its previous mission. Set up is a less intuitive than it should be, but after some trial and error, you can figure it out easily. I mapped out two areas of lawn that are separated by our house, and it seems to work well. You will have to create "channels" between the areas of lawn that the robot follows. You will have to manually open gates of course, but it makes it from the back to the front reliably. The app reports progress clearly so you are always aware where the mower relative to the complete task. Some things that I hope will improve with OTA updates: You have set up all of your lawn zones as a single task and you cannot do the back and front independently. I have it set up to do my back first and then the front. When it is done with the front, the mower has to enter my back lawn and then make it back to the charger. My charger is set up between the lawns so it would be more efficient for the robot to go directly to the charger without going to the back lawn first. I mistakenly selected the option to map the shortest path to the charger, which made the mower try to go through a brick wall. The camera detected the wall, but then the mower got confused and just couldn't find its way to the charger - it was relatively amusing to see it try, but it was obvious that it wasn't going to succeed. It was not intuitive how to change the channel - I finally discovered that the mower needs to be in the boundary of one of the lawn zones to allow a channel to be selected for a redo. Once I figured this out, it was relatively easy to set up a channel that allows the mower to automatically navigate to the charger. I also found it is better to turn off the camera when navigating a long channel, e.g. the channel from the back lawn to the front lawn. If the camera is on and there is something close to the path (a stray branch from a plant, a planter, etc.), the robot things it needs to assess if it can get around it and then it can do some relatively creative rerouting, sometimes unsuccessfully. Turning off the camera results in it confidently navigating the path to the next zone. If you have to stop and lift the mower due to an obstruction, the app instructs you to press OK and the home button to restart the mower. That doesn't seem to work. It does clear if you put the mower within the boundary of a zone, but the conflicting directions make things somewhat unclear. Overall, I am very comfortable with the machine. For the most part, it does what it says it will do, and is very reliable. I expect it to continue to get better with additional firmware updates, and the positives far outweigh the niggling negatives that I have observed so far. Highly recommended

# Navimow Review I have been using the Navimow for a few months now, and my impressions are positive but mixed. Let’s start with the positives. When the Navimow works correctly, it is amazing. You can schedule your lawn to be mowed every day, in the middle of the night if you want, so that it looks freshly cut all the time. The Navimow usually leaves beautiful, parallel cut lines that instantly improve the appearance of your lawn. The problem is, put as simply as possible, I don’t trust my Navimow to operate autonomously. I’ll go into more detail below, but I’ll mention the two largest problems: 1. The Navimow frequently gets stuck. The included wheels are simply terrible. At least on my lawn, the device often gets itself stuck in the lawn or garden bed, and ends up digging a rut trying to get itself out. Segway’s Navimow Off-Road tires — which Segway’s support provided to me for free (normally ~$100) — do indeed help. And I found that third-party Spikes help even more. More on this below under Traction. 2. The mower is unpredictable. I don’t think there is a single root cause of this; I think it is caused by GPS imprecision, traction control, and “Vision Fence” (the vision AI) failures. Whatever the cause, the Navimow cannot be trusted around “dangerous” boundaries. This includes cliffs, like a curb. But it also includes V-shaped gulleys that separate the lawn from a raised mulch bed. If you let the Navimow near these dangerous areas, it will inevitably fall or get stuck. I have given up trying to get my Navimow to mow the strip of grass adjacent to the curb. ## Setup If you watch video reviews, people will remark that setup is very quick and easy. While it’s surely easier than having to run a boundary wire, finding a location for the base station and antenna was non-trivial for me. One thing that was unclear to me when purchasing was that the antenna and base station need to have a good view of the southern sky, which greatly limited where I can put them. I also didn’t want to put the base station on the grass, since that would kill it. I ended up putting the base station on a raised mulch bed, and running the power cord through a window. It’s not ideal, but it works. Now, normally the Navimow cannot climb onto mulch because of its terrible wheels. So I put down a welcome mat to help the Navimow “climb” the mulch. It took me a while, but I eventually figured out that Vision Fence would cause the Navimow to ignore the mat sometimes and try to climb the mulch a few feet away, at which point it would often get stuck. But fortunately, after disabling Vision Fence near the mat, the robot was able to consistently reach the base station. The other aspect of Setup is mapping. ## Mapping The first few times you make a map on the Navimow, it’s pretty fun. You literally use the robot like a remote control car and draw an outline of the area. This does work pretty well, but it quickly becomes burdensome. Making adjustments to the map also requires driving the robot around. If you want to mark an area as off limits, you need to drive the robot around. For small adjustments, it is both clunky and inconvenient. If the robot is not in the area, I don’t want to drive it over just to make a small adjustment. It would be better to overlay a satellite image and allow adjustments to be made directly from the app. It’s also imprecise to use the large robot to mark off small areas to avoid, such as a sprinkler. It’s unclear what the off-limits areas mean. If the Navimow is in a position marking an off-limits area, does that mean the center of the Navimow is off-limits, or any portion of where the robot covers is off-limits? Similarly, when operating, are all portions of the Navimow prohibited from entering off-limits areas, or just the center? A similar problem occurs when trying to use the robot to mark steep and difficult terrain areas. To mark these as off limits, you need to drive the robot around them. But because they are difficult areas to traverse, obviously driving the robot there can be difficult! ## Obstacle Avoidance Obstacle avoidance uses the Navimow “Vision Fence” feature. I have found that it works very well for avoiding dog toys and large sticks in the backyard. Unfortunately, it fails to detect many other obstacles. I’ve seen it run into my mailbox, a gate, and run over sprinklers and flags. When it runs into sturdy objects like a mailbox or gate, it then spins its wheels and digs a rut before realizing it hit something. Vision Fence also seems to detect phantom objects. I have encountered this often in channels, which are paths connecting one mowing area to another. When Vision Fence is enabled, it will inexplicably decide to move a few feet away from the designated channel. Since I have a mat at the location of the channel to help the Navimow get on the mulch, this few feet avoidance results in the robot getting stuck. It would be nice to have an indication in the app of when an obstacle is detected by Vision Fence. But at the moment, there is no way to know why the robot decided to veer off its course. You can see a video of the Navimow absolutely failing to detect an obstacle. Inexplicably, instead of backing up, it doubles down and tries to motor through the gate, making fresh ruts in the grass it just mowed. Since the Navimow does not detect hoses, I resorted to using landscape clips to pin the hoses below the mowing height, and adding the sprinklers themselves as “no go” zones. ## Traction The Navimow frequently has poor traction using its included wheels. It’s advertised to work on 10 degree grades, which is surprisingly flat. I’ve found that it really can’t do more than that. I have a few 11 degree areas that it simply can’t traverse. It’s possible to work around these “steep” areas by turning off edge mowing and setting the direction that the Navimow cuts so that it will approach the steep area at an angle. This helps, but there are other areas of my lawn that the Navimow simply can’t reach. It is also extremely common to see the Navimow slipping even on flat terrain, though it can usually recover. The Navimow struggles even more when it is off grass. In particular, in my yard, I have mulched garden beds. In most cases, if the Navimow enters the mulched area, it will lose traction and get stuck. It will attempt to free itself, make a large rut in the process, but will ultimately fail. I have found it difficult to keep the Navimow out of these areas. Whether because of Vision Fence, or GPS imprecision, the Navimow does sometimes go outside of the defined boundaries, which causes it to get stuck. After contacting Segway’s support about some of the problems I encountered, they provided me a free set of the Segway Navimow Off-road wheels. I found that they greatly improved traction and overall performance. When on grass, it rarely slipped and needed to backtrack with the Off-Road wheels. Unfortunately, the wheels did not help the Navimow escape the U-shaped gulley between the lawn and garden beds. There is also a single, fairly steep pitch in the backyard that the Navimow could not climb with the Off-Road tires. Overall, the Off-Road tires are a huge improvement, and Segway should really consider including them as the default tires. At the same time as Segway shipped the Off-road wheels to me, I also ordered a pair of custom 3d printed spikes from a German company, "Lux Metallbau & 3D Druck”. I ordered their V4 spikes, which have an aggressive shape but are made of a breakable plastic to protect the drivechain from being harmed. The spikes are screwed onto the outside of the wheels and sit just outside the body of the mower. I installed them onto the Off-Road tires, and this combination was fantastic. With the spikes, the Navimow can climb any slope on my yard, as long as it has grass. The only problem areas are steep slopes with hard dirt that the spikes cannot penetrate. The only downside to the spikes is that they do not provide good traction on plastic. My charging pad is not completely level, and while this was not a problem for the grip of the rubber tires, the Navimow frequently slips off the side of the pad when it tries to dock. This is not a problem, because it simply backs up and tries again, and usually docks successfully within a few attempts. I did not have to make any modifications to the dock. With the Off-Road and Spike combination, my Navimow is able to climb a complicated slope into the back corner of my yard, which means that the Navimow is able to reach and mow all portions of my yard. ## Mowing Quality In general, mows look very smooth and even, with very good striping. The only downside is that the Navimow does NOT mulch. In other words, it chops off the top of the grass blade and it falls down. I have found that these often sit on top of the lawn, which is not ideal for aesthetic reasons, but is also not a huge deal. While the Navimow will easily run over leaves and cut them, they won’t be chopped up into tiny pieces like a mulching mower would produce. Also unlike a mulching mower, it does not produce lift that will pull leaves that have fallen below the cutting height, so many leaves will be left untouched by the Navimow. ## Support I did contact Segway support about my issues, and overall I found them to be understanding and courteous. As I mentioned above, in response to the traction issues I faced, they sent me a free pair of Off-Road tires, which greatly improved the performance of my mower. They also said that they passed along my suggestions to the relevant departments, though I am a bit skeptical of that because I have not received any follow-up questions at all. Regardless, the bottom line is that Segway does seem to take their customer support seriously, and they do seem to care about customer satisfaction. ## Conclusion Although I faced a number of frustrations and challenges when using the Navimow, over time I was able to find solutions to almost all of them, and I am happy with the end result, even though one of the solutions was a pair of third-party Spikes. As a product, I think that most of its shortcomings could still be fixed with software upgrades. And most of the traction problems could be improved by supplying the off-road wheels for free. Ultimately, I think that as long as you do not expect the Navimow to completely replace your traditional lawn mower, and you are willing to spend the effort to fix or work-around problem areas, most people will find good value in the Navimow. I am happy to have mine, and look forward to using it other seasons. ## Specific suggestions for Segway Navimow team - Allow dangerous boundaries to be marked, which the Navimow should never cross. - Allow map editing using image overlay. This could be satellite imagery, or rough imagery generated from the camera on the Navimow itself. - Add option to wait for a period of time when GPS signal is lost. - If an error occurs, power off before the battery is completely drained. This way, once the user fixes the error, the robot can still return to the base on its own power. - Improve the wheels’ traction. Consider shipping the Off Road tires as the default. Also consider adding Spikes. - Improve vision fence introspection. The robot often behaves strangely, and it would be helpful to know when this is caused by vision fence failures, so that the user can create areas to disable vision fence. - Improve vision fence performance (don't run into gates, mailboxes, hoses, or sprinklers). - Add a “gate” channel type for channels that require operator assistance. The robot should wait at the start of the channel for the user to indicate it is safe to proceed. This would be useful for gates that need to be manually opened or closed.