Advinsys TerraMow V600 Robot Lawn Mower Review – sensational, it just works

The battle of the backyard is on in earnest. Robot lawnmowers are the new focus for robotics companies. Having mastered the art of vacuuming and mopping inside our homes, it’s now time to master the backyards and get those lawns looking spectacular. In our latest review, we’re testing out the TerraMow V600 robot lawn mower from Advinsys.

The EFTM Snapshot: built around strong AI vision that maps yards autonomously, distinguishes grass from driveways and gutters, and lets you fine-tune scheduling, mow direction, and cutting height per zone. It got stuck a handful of times early on (gutters, a rock wall, a deep divot) but learned from each spot and hasn’t gotten stuck since, and it even snapped a couple of blades on debris, though both were easy to recover. Sitting in the mid-range price bracket, it punches above its class, delivering a lower cut than a push mower and handling front and back yards with genuine confidence — a real surprise packet and a strong buy for anyone ready to hand the lawn over to a robot.

I’ll start out by saying I was skeptical about this product, mainly because I hadn’t heard of it, and I’d also never heard of the company distributing it, called Advinsys. There’s a lot of information on their website. It promotes their products, of which they have several, but there are some concerns I have around the links to their warranty policy, returns and exchange, and shipping and delivery. They all go to a single page, which doesn’t mention any of those things.

That said, if you’re buying this directly through Amazon, you’re likely buying from an Australian retailer, and you should be covered by Australian Consumer Law. I mention that only to give context that its three-year warranty is excellent, but I can’t speak to exactly how well that will be handled at a local level.

I think it’s important to put that up front because you will be comparing this product to much better-known brands like Ecovacs, Mova, and others which are selling in our major bricks-and-mortar retail stores as well as online. The thing is, this thing is so good I’m almost willing to ignore all that.

Out of the box, this is an odd-looking thing: two large rear wheels and one small front wheel that isn’t actually anything other than a simple dolly wheel, because all of the drive and steering is done by those rear wheels. It’s got a bit of height to it with the camera system on the front, which is their AI vision, and in fact that seems to do all the work.

Paired with the app, it all pretty much gets underway smoothly and with ease. With the TerraMow, you simply press play and let it do its thing. What it does then is just look around and find your yard. It can see the grass, it can see the boundaries, and it can tell the difference between a gutter, a driveway, and grass. For that reason, it can do its own job of mapping your home.

It does that to the point where my front yard links directly to my neighbor’s front yard and up their driveway. The grass runs all the way to their house. In fact, if I hadn’t kept my eye on this thing and looked at the map and begun to edit the map, this little guy would have mowed part of my neighbor’s lawn easily, just because it’s all connected, one connected piece of grass.

Kind of like with most robot vacuums, once you’ve established some sort of map, you can start to edit it by putting in boundaries and no-go zones. Good thing is, I didn’t need it to return to base to begin to do that. I was able to pause the job and simply start setting up those boundaries, like across to the neighbor’s place.

Once it did that bit of lawn, I set it on a traditional mow, and it does what you expect from a good modern robot lawn mower. It does the mow in strategic lines back and forth, like any other person would mow, not a random pattern.

I live on a corner block with a corner driveway. While I’ve got a lot of driveway space, I’ve got three different areas of grass:

• The small corner
• The front
• The side

My next challenge was to see how well this could do the whole area. To do that, you set up a little pathway. You essentially drive the TerraMow across a path or a driveway. In my case, I drove it across the driveway in two areas to allow it to identify and find larger zones within my property. Having completed that and had it scout around, it successfully mapped three large areas of grass around my home.

And by the way, this is the first time I’ve used a robot lawnmower out the front. For years, I’ve had robot lawnmowers out the back of my home because, essentially, they’re restricted. They’re never gonna stray. They’re gonna bump into a fence or hit a pathway. They’re not gonna escape my home. It’s a real fear I have that this thing’s gonna drive onto the road out the front of my house and cause some sort of traffic problem. Once I realized that this thing absolutely identified grass, I didn’t really have that fear at all.

I let it go for a couple of weeks, and in the first week, over three different mowing schedules, it got trapped three times:

• On a gutter
• On a rock wall on the side of my home
• In a large divot in my grass

Each of those was totally understandable. I don’t even, for a second, put any fault on the system or the technology of this mower. My grass at the front is quite thick and thatchy. It sits higher than the gutter, so when it went close to the gutter, it essentially tripped down and was stuck. That rock wall on the side sits at quite an angle where the grass is steep, and it’s not well defined. Plus, my grass isn’t perfectly edged over there. There’s a large part of my grass where I think there used to be a tree, which is essentially a 20 cm or nearly 30 cm divot. With a normal lawn mower, it was simply something I would run over, since the grass sits higher in the divot. The TerraMow is so small and nimble that it was getting into the divot and actually mowing it very well, something I hadn’t seen before. Once it learned that, though, and it was removed from that area, it actually never got stuck again.

What’s really fascinating is that when it gets stuck, it actually suggests you build a no-go zone into the app, so it walks you through the process of making sure it never happens again.

Here’s the thing: once I took the time to strategically build that map, I drew the lines around the gutters and the edges. It never got stuck again. It’s probably been two months, and this thing has never gotten stuck on its own since that initial setup.

The app allows for the regular things you’d expect from a robot mower, like scheduling. The great thing is I’m able to schedule it per zone. Rather than saying, “Go and do the whole yard today,” it’s doing each area on different days, and then it’s doing the edge on a separate day. Even better, I’m able to set the direction of the mow in each zone so that I’m essentially running perpendicular to the road on both sides of the corner block. I’m also able to program the cutting height in each zone separately. These are intricate things I never imagined would be in the app, but they’re all there.

And then there’s the spot mow. If you did have another area, or you couldn’t get your mower to find its own way from one place to another, you can literally pick this mower up, take it to a spot, put it down, and in the app just tell it to do a spot mow. It will mow that area, save that part of the map if you need, and then you can return it to its base on your own. Actually, really handy for people with a small backyard and a large front yard, or vice versa.

This TerraMow is a real surprise packet. The mow was low, probably a lower trim than I’ve ever put on my own grass, even with my mower at its lowest setting. That’s because it’s light, with kind of chunky wheels, so it’s able to get in deeper, and the blades can be lowered further. Like every robot mower I’ve seen, the blades are actually razor blades underneath spinning on a disc.

I did have two instances where it had blade errors after hitting either a rock or some other obstacle. Now, first and foremost, the app alerted me to this. It knew there was a problem, and I was able to go lift up the mower and notice the blade was missing. Here’s the thing: when a blade is missing, you’ve got to find it. It literally took the screw and the blade off the disc. I don’t know how, and that worries me a little. I was able to find and recover the blade in both cases.

If you’ve got rocky areas or you’re prone to having large sticks on the lawn, you need to be very cautious about any incident where the mower gets stuck in place. If it gets stuck, lift it up and check whether any blades are missing so you can find them easily.

It’s priced at $1,999 on the Advinsys website and about $2,199 on Amazon , although there’s a coupon available there worth checking out.

This thing is what I would call a mid-range robot mower. There are certainly robot mowers in the low-$1,000 area. Those are basic, simple, often not fully autonomous mowers with a single blade, requiring some sort of RTK or boundary system. Then there are the $3,000 robot mowers that may have more advanced features like Lidar or other mapping processes.

I actually think this sits in the sweet spot. Whatever vision AI technology they’ve embedded in this is exceptional. Its ability to see what is around it is unquestioned by me, to the point where, on the weekend, we filled that divot on that side lawn with some sand and dirt fill from Bunnings. It’s not mowing that area now because it sees that it’s not grass, so it’s avoiding that area where we’ve put the fill.

This is a very smart robot. A couple of times in the early mows, it missed a spot, but it hasn’t happened since, and it’s getting as close to the edge as I want to put it. Out the front, I’m not going to tempt it to go onto the gutters.

It took me 20 minutes to whippersnip in my front yard, and over summer, that’s a job I’m happy to do if it means that the rest of the job is being done by a robot.

I don’t know how long that $500 coupon is available on Amazon that I saw when I looked at it this morning, but for $1,699, this thing’s an unbelievable value at $2,000. I still think it’s a good buy. This is the product that’ll make you realize, “Wow, we really can use robots to mow our lawns.”

Web: Advinsys