Worx Landroid Vision M600 WR206E review: One of the best robot mowers you can buy

With the Landroid Vision M600 WR206E, Worx has gone to great lengths to eliminate a significant barrier that puts some people off buying a robot mower – the need to lay perimeter wire. Where Worx’s previous robots have needed this subterranean electric fence to stop them veering off your lawn and into your flower beds, the Vision uses a camera to make sure it’s always on the lawn.

That makes it one of the easiest robot lawn mowers I’ve tested to set up. However, it does also require a big leap of faith. Because with no physical boundary, you’re putting all your hopes into the robot’s ability to recognise your lawn’s edges and stop itself from crossing the line.

Worx Landroid Vision M600 WR206E review: What do you get for the money?

Because it doesn’t use a boundary wire, the box of the Worx Landroid Vision M600 WR206E isn’t quite as full of hardware as the wired models. Gone is the reel of cable and the packs of pegs required to pin it down.

Everything else is present, however, with a large base station used to recharge the mower and lawn screws to secure it, plus all the cable you need to hook it up to the mains. The mower plugs into a standard wall socket and is designed to be kept switched on at all times, so you’ll ideally need an outdoor power socket to keep it running.

There are a couple of items in the box you won’t find with most mowers. One is a pair of magnetic strips, which can be used to block off areas you don’t want the robot to cross. Each one is 5m long and stops the robot from crossing wherever you lay it.

There is also a pair of RFID plates, which can be used to create a virtual bridge across a border, such as a path or drive. This takes the robot from one section of lawn to another, with the time spent in each section set from the app. The RFID plates are placed on the ground so the robot can find them when you want it to cross to a new area.

Then there’s the robot itself. The M600 is one of the smaller models in the Vision range, but it is still quite large, measuring 460 x 626 x 265mm (WDH) and weighing 13.5kg. It’s capable of covering a lawn of up to 600m2, and other models in the range can handle 800, 1,300m2 and 1,600m2. As you go up the range, the supplied batteries get more powerful, which means they can stay out for longer, and the latter two units are even bigger with a larger rotating cutting plate.

The on-mower controls are the same as you’ll find on Worx’s wired models, with a simple mono screen and a menu system controlled by a rotary knob. There’s also a large red stop button for emergency shut-downs. You can raise or lower the cutting plate between 30mm and 60mm using a dial on the top.

READ NEXT: Best cordless lawn mower

Worx Landroid Vision M600 WR206E review: Is it difficult to set up?

As I’ve already mentioned, the ease of setup is one of the key features of the Worx Landroid Vision M600 WR206E. You still need to set up a base station, so it isn’t quite drop-and-mow like the LawnMaster VBRM16, but that model adds hassle later, needing manual battery recharging.

However, you need to do little else. A camera in the robot keeps an eye on what’s ahead of it and, if it thinks it’s approaching the border of your lawn, it will turn around and find a new place to mow.

You can set the mower just using the control panel on the top, but it’s even easier with the app. This lets you start, stop and send the mower home to charge. You can even put it into “party mode” – effectively a snooze mode that ignores any schedules you’ve set up until you switch it off again. You can also use the app to manually set a schedule, or have Worx manage your lawn for you, based on things such as lawn size and grass type.

READ NEXT: Best lawn mower for a small garden

Worx Landroid Vision M600 WR206E review: How well does it mow?

Beneath the Worx Landroid Vision M600 WR206E, the cutting plate is relatively standard, in that it’s a rotating disc with three razor-like steel blades attached. As the disc spins, the blades slice the top off the grass. Send the robot out every day, and the cut grass is barely noticeable, and mulches down into the lawn nicely.

The difference between the M600’s mechanism and most basic robots is that it’s positioned offset to the right. This means it isn’t cutting across the whole width of the mower but gets closer to the edge on one side. This is particularly helpful when it’s performing its edging routine, where the robot performs an anti-clockwise lap of your lawn, following as close as it can to the edge with its bladed side.

It left a small uncut section along the edge of my lawn, but this was, at worst, around 20cm wide, and often narrower than that. Impressively, I found it was cutting closer to the edge than most robots that use a perimeter wire, which only get this close with careful installation.

There’s one main downside, though. The Worx Landroid M600 still uses a random path to keep your lawn trimmed, rather than a sensible regular pattern that can efficiently cover the lawn in a shorter time.

Unlike other robots, such as the Segway Navimow i105E, it doesn’t use satellites to locate itself. That means it doesn’t hold a map of your lawn, and it doesn’t know where it has or hasn’t been. Instead, when it detects that it’s at a border, it turns a random angle and sets off in a new direction.

That means the robot needs to be out longer in order to cover the whole of your lawn. My lawn is about 100m2 and it cut most of the lawn in the first outing, but there were still a few tufts of longer grass left behind after several mows. The random nature of the mowing also means it might not perform as well in a garden with a complicated layout.

Thanks to its cameras, however, it is pretty good at avoiding obstacles. I placed an array of dog toys on the lawn, including balls, ropes and sticks, and the Landroid skillfully dodged them all. It did an equally good job of detecting my presence and turning around rather than running over my feet.

Worx Landroid Vision M600 WR206E review: Should you buy it?

The Worx Landroid Vision M600 WR206E is one of the best robot mowers I’ve tested. It bravely approaches the edge of the lawn and understands where it can’t cross, rather than relying on you to guide it, either with a wire or a haphazard remote control.

Its offset cutting blade helps it do a great job of edging, too, and its ability to avoid obstacles means you don’t need to tidy up before you send it out. The only negative is that its random movement means it has to go out more often than a mower that cuts in a regular pattern, which could lead to more wear and tear on your grass.

If you’d rather have a mower that has a regular pattern, opt for the Segway Navimow i105E. This will take more setting up, as it has a device on a stick that communicates with satellites. This needs connecting to the base station, plus you have to guide the robot around the perimeter of your lawn to map where it can and can’t go. Once done, however, the robot covers the lawn quickly and sensibly in consecutive stripes, however it won’t avoid objects such as garden toys.

If you’re on a tight budget and have a very small lawn, then the LawnMaster VBRM16 has a lot of similarities to the Vision M600. It also uses a camera to stay on the lawn and moves in random patterns, but when it’s done, you have to stop it and manually charge it and it’s also nowhere near as neat at edging.