Eufy Lawnbot E18 review: An ideal robot mower for smaller yards

Best Prices Today: Eufy Lawnbot E18

Research and development efforts aren’t cheap. Outsourcing is one of the ways manufacturers can more affordably expand their product offerings, and some smart home brands—including Anker’s Eufy smart home division—have taken this approach rather than developing their own products in-house. In this case, we’re talking about robot lawn mowers.

The Eufy Lawnbot E-series robot lawn mowers that Anker debuted at CES last January are actually rebranded TerraMow models that have been available in Europe since mid-2024. Apart from battery size, the two Lawnbot E-series mowers are identical, with the model E15 capable of handling up to 0.2 acres, while the model E18 reviewed here is suitable for up to 0.3 acres.

Specifications

Both Lawnbot E-series mowers might seem small compared to much of the competition—suburban and rural American yards tend to be very large—but you don’t need to own an acre or more of turf to appreciate a robot lawn mower.

These are smallish, rear-wheel drive mowers, but don’t let their size fool you: Both machines are packed with smarts. The GPS navigation that so many other modern mowers use, however, is not one of their features. These mowers map your yard using computer vision alone.

Moving from unboxing to mowing happened more quickly with the Eufy Lawnbot E18 than any other mower I’ve evaluated to date.

The mower maps your yard completely on its own: you only direct it to the portions of the yard you want it to map and then draw pathways between these areas. I had the Lawnbot E18 up and running in my yard in less than 30 minutes.

While it’s exciting to see a mower that doesn’t depend on GPS satellites or require a complex installation involving antennas on tripods and the like, I certainly had my doubts about a mower that relies solely on vision, but those have largely dispersed—at least regarding Eufy’s (and TerraMow’s) bots.

Setup

The initial setup of the Eufy Lawnbot E18 involves finding a suitable location for the mower’s base station, plugging it in, and then turning your attention to the mower itself. While the mower comes with enough charge to complete setup, we charged it to 100 percent, which took less than half an hour (Eufy says a drained battery should reach a full charge within 90 to 110 minutes).

After that, you can start mapping from within the app. Place the E18 anywhere within a grassy area (the app will guide you) and allow it to calibrate. The mower will spin in a circle, utilizing its cameras to determine its location in the world.

Watching a robot doing donuts in your yard will seem odd, but that’s how this mower determines its precise location without the assistance of GPS. Once that orientation process is successful, the mower will proceed to map the entire area of grass.

I have a complex yard, so I set the Lawnbot E18 free on the easiest patches of grass first. It handled these spectacularly, needing less than 10 minutes to map the 400 square feet. The mower struggled in the sloped portions of my yard, however, often attempting to map areas that were too steep for it to navigate. This required me to set no-go zones and boundaries within the app to prevent it from getting stuck. All-wheel drive would have helped with this, but the E-series mowers only drive their rear wheels.

The mower also insisted on returning to its base station after each zone was mapped, which I found frustrating. When it came to mowing areas far from the base station, this added a considerable amount of time to the mapping process. This behavior might be necessitated by the Lawnbot E18’s reliance on computer vision for navigation.

Apart from that, the Lawnbot E18 was surprisingly smooth at mapping, even in areas with view obstructions or obstacles. You won’t spend much time setting up a more basic yard; indeed, moving from unboxing to mowing happened more quickly with the Lawnbot E18 than any other mower I’ve evaluated to date.

Performance

The Lawnbot E18 is underpowered compared to most of the rear-wheel drive mowers I’ve tested in this price range, and it can climb slopes of only 18 degrees or less. If you have anything more than gradual rises in your yard, you will likely run into trouble with this mower.

While the Lawnbot E18 is smaller than most robot lawn mowers I’ve reviewed, its size—and the fact that its cutting blades are quite close to the edge of its deck—gives it at least one important advantage: Bulkier mowers can have difficulty maneuvering around obstacles, leaving unsightly strips of uncut grass behind.

That said, the E18’s small cutting radius—8 inches—results in longer mowing times than many other robot mowers. But I’m OK with that, provided the mower does its job. And for the most part, the Lawnbot E18 does its job.

While its vision navigation isn’t perfect, the mower performed well overall, and the maps it created became increasingly more precise with each run. This meant the E18 left fewer untouched patches of grass after a few mowing sessions. Another surprise came when I packed the mower away and then re-installed it later for a photoshoot. I put its base station in approximately the same location, but I assumed the mower would need to create an entirely new map; instead, it recognized the yard and adjusted itself accordingly.

Some of the most significant navigation issues I experienced were sun blindness and incorrectly identifying tall grass and weeds as obstructions. You can change the direction of its cut by zone; however, there is no option for alternating the direction it mows to prevent its wheels from leaving tracks in your lawn. Segway’s E3-series mowers have this feature, and it’s great.

The Lawnbot E18 can’t operate in the dark, either, even though it’s equipped with an LED light that can be turned on while it’s in remote control mode. This means you won’t be able to mow your lawns at night, as you can with some competing mowers.

The Eufy app

Some of the problems I encountered with the Lawnbot E18 can probably be chalked up to software/firmware issues. Until June, the base station had to be placed within a mow zone, or the bot wouldn’t be able to find it. And you could only set the mow direction for your entire yard rather than by zone. Also, an errant firmware update in early June temporarily prevented some Eufy mowers from operating at all. These problems reminded me of what I dealt with during my Mammotion Yuka 1500 review last year.

In both cases, things improved over time. Eufy’s Lawnbot app is now much more stable than when I first tested the E18 in May. It also got better at detecting transitions between grass and sidewalk. Walkway stones, on the other hand, continuously tripped up the mower, as it would treat them as a solid sidewalk.

If you own other Eufy smart home devices—whether it be security cameras, video doorbells, smart lighting, vacuums, or mops—you’ll use the same app to control the Lawnbot. It will appear under the Clean tab. The app is generally easy to use, although a bug would sometimes cause the mower to occasionally disappear from the app’s Home page.

The app’s live-view feature is generally useful, provided you have good Wi-Fi coverage in your yard, but it does take some getting used to. The mower’s movements are somewhat jerky, so it can appear as though the machine is lurching in unexpected directions when it really isn’t. I didn’t thoroughly test the app’s remote-control function, however, as my Wi-Fi router doesn’t blanket my yard with coverage.

Should you buy the Eufy Lawnbot E18?

That the Eufy Lawnbot E18 is a rebranded TerraMow product doesn’t lessen its appeal—at least for homeowners with smaller lawns. Its reliance on visual navigation is novel, but that feature gets you as close to plug-and-play as you’ll get with a robot lawn mower. It’s a great option for folks who feel overwhelmed by modern technology. And if you own other Eufy smart home products, you won’t even need to download another app.

If you have a larger or more complex yard, the Sunseeker Orion X7 AWD will probably be more suitable. Or if you don’t want to wait for a mower to learn the shape of your yard, you might consider the Mowrator S1 4WD, which you control with a gaming console-like remote instead of relying on the mower to navigate.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best robot lawn mowers.

Best Prices Today: Eufy Lawnbot E18

Author: Ed Oswald, Contributor