In June, I reviewed my first robotic lawnmower: the GPS- and satellite-connected Segway Navimow X430. It was good! But it felt like overkill for the little lawn I sicked it on. So when Roborock, which makes robot vacuums that many people swear by, offered to let me try one of its first mow-bots, the much more reasonably sized and specced RockNeo Q110H, I jumped on the opportunity.<\/p>\n
At $1,300, the RockNeo Q110H is the cheapest robot mower that Roborock sells in the U.S., and it shows. It\u2019s a two-wheel drive model with swiveling front wheels and a manual dial for adjusting mowing height, and Roborock advertises it as requiring you to jam an RTK antenna (real-time kinematic) into your lawn. It\u2019s comparable to Segway\u2019s $1,600 Navimow i210 LiDAR, which I received alongside the X430 but didn\u2019t have time to fully test.<\/p>\n
Are the quality-of-life features that Roborock dispensed with to bring costs down, such as automatic height adjustment, a reasonable sacrifice? It depends on the yard you have. After a week of testing, I\u2019m not fully sold on the RockNeo Q110H for lawns like mine, which includes obstacles such as tall garden plants and paving stones, as well as a sharp incline that thwarts the robot\u2019s plasticky wheels. But for other folks, the Q110H could be a reasonable package. It\u2019s a more user-friendly option than auto-mowers of the past, since it doesn\u2019t require you to dig guide-wire trenches. If you have a simple, flat yard and can\u2019t swing the much pricier Segway Navimow i210, it could very well offer all the functionality you need.<\/p>\n
Roborock\u2019s first entry-level robot mower is a great option for small, simple yards with good satellite coverage.<\/p>\n
Setting up the RockNeo Q110H isn\u2019t quite as simple as getting started with the Navimow X430, but it\u2019s close. At 27 pounds and 25 inches long, the Q110H is nowhere near as chonky as the X430, making it easier to move around. You\u2019ll plug in the dock, set the robot on it, then connect the device to the Roborock app by scanning a QR code on its butt. The big difference is the RTK antenna, which the setup process takes you straight to and doesn\u2019t let you skip. Near the end of testing, I noticed an update had brought NRTK support. I asked in an email whether Roborock plans to make that the default for setup going forward, and company representative Ruben Rodriguez replied that Roborock doesn\u2019t plan to for now, as NRTK isn\u2019t available everywhere. It worked for me, though. After I activated the feature, the app spent some time calibrating its map, and then I was able to continue mowing as usual.<\/p>\n
Speaking of mapping, that was the next step after antenna setup. The Q110H can apparently do this all on its own, but only in a simple yard, and the Roborock app performs some behind-the-scenes calculation to determine whether the mower will even try. Clearly, my yard was deemed too treacherous\u2014it didn\u2019t offer the auto-mapping option, so I did it the more fun, manual way: walking behind the Q110H while driving it around the perimeter of the area I wanted to map via the app\u2019s onscreen controls. Having learned my lesson during my first auto-mower review, I didn\u2019t bother trying to map the whole yard at once; instead, I broke it into sections and created channels to pass between them. The app lets you turn off the Q110H\u2019s camera-based obstacle avoidance, which is key for getting through pavers and hanging vegetation that can thwart the mower between zones. All in all, setup took about 45 minutes, from unboxing to my first mow.<\/p>\n
When the Q110H runs, it stripes your yard up and down in an orientation it chooses. (You can adjust this in the Roborock app if you\u2019d rather it go a different direction or change its orientation every time it mows.) It\u2019s mostly quiet when it\u2019s on grass, although the whining of the motors in its rear wheels was louder than what I heard from the Navimow X430 and i210 LiDAR, both of which I found totally silent when I wasn\u2019t right next to them. When the Q110H got to the pavers between sections of my yard, though, it sounded like someone was tumbling an empty plastic tote around.\u00a0Still, you wouldn\u2019t notice it while inside your house.<\/p>\n
I knew the two-wheel-drive setup might cause problems for the Q110H, and it did. The mower regularly dug little ruts in my yard when it tried to mount certain uneven pavers with its little shopping-cart-style front wheels, and I had to rescue it multiple times from a sandy pit near its dock. For comparison, the Navimow i210 cruised right over the same pavers and sand pit that stymied the Q110H. I was surprised by how well the Q110H handled the slope in my front yard, which is well beyond its 24-degree incline max, but I still wouldn\u2019t recommend using it there. It skittered and slid on its way down, and its two large wheels churned dirt up from beneath the grass on its way back up. Nevertheless, I\u2019m sure it would do just fine on the gentle slopes it\u2019s rated for. The i210 also skittered down my front yard\u2019s slope but couldn\u2019t make the return trip without stopping in its tracks when its lift sensors were triggered.<\/p>\n
The Q110H navigated the area I\u2019d mapped out for it reasonably well, but there were issues with the RTK antenna. For one, at the start of many runs, the mower had to spend a couple dozen seconds driving this way and that to calibrate its position, and I found it needed lots of room to do so. I still have the X430 set up in the same area, and if it bumped that, it would give up, stop, and require rescue. The Q110H\u2019s map also seemed prone to drifting, and early on, the device knocked over a tall garden plant in an area I\u2019d specifically told it not to enter. On two occasions, the RTK antenna couldn\u2019t even get a signal, though that was forgivable, considering that the only place I could install it was between two two-story houses.<\/p>\n
All that said, the Q110H did fine even in areas where it didn\u2019t have a direct line of sight to the antenna, such as a patch of backyard around the corner from where I\u2019d installed the beacon. It mowed well at night, too, and I found I never had to worry about it ramming the poor, wire garden fence that the X430 maimed during an earlier review process.<\/p>\n
More than once, I had to redo a mow because the Q110H ignored whole sections of the yard, like on its first go at my front lawn. And it missed smaller bits on most mows, the way a lot of robot vacuums can inexplicably ignore certain parts of your home. When I ran it again within a day, however, it would clean up, specifically hitting the spots it had skipped before. Realistically, that\u2019s not an issue if you run the mower regularly; these products are best used to shave a yard every couple of days anyway, rather than to chop grass down after a week or two of growth.<\/p>\n
The good news is that navigation seemed to improve over time. By the end of testing, the Q110H got stuck less and more consistently covered my lawn. That was also true of the runs I did after I ditched the RTK antenna and switched the robot to NRTK (network real-time kinematic) mode. By the end of the review, Roborock\u2019s mower was navigating about as well as the two Navimow products I tested, and its small size meant it could go places the behemoth X430 couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
The Q110H\u2019s two cameras work well enough for obstacle avoidance\u2014the bot regularly drove around plants, my pets, and other random yard obstacles\u2014but it didn\u2019t always handle surprises well. When I put my foot directly in its path several times during the day, the robot mostly stopped and went around, but it bumped my leg once and drove over my foot another time. I wouldn\u2019t let it run with small pets or children nearby, but otherwise, it was solid.<\/p>\n
Roborock says the RockNeo Q110H can mow up to a quarter acre in a day, which is more than enough to cover most U.S. lawns. I wouldn\u2019t expect it to do that all in one go, though: it tended to lose around 60 to 70 percent of its battery dealing with the mowable areas of my front and back yards, which are altogether about 1\/20th of an acre.<\/p>\n
Roborock\u2019s app looks and works similarly to Segway\u2019s Navimow app. On its main screen, you get a map of your yard with controls to start the mower, send it home, start a remote control session, and access settings. I found some of its layout to be slightly more intuitive than Segway\u2019s app, though. For instance, tapping the \u201cPreferences\u201d button on the main screen lets you control the mower\u2019s \u201cefficiency\u201d\u2014which primarily seems to affect how fast it moves\u2014and adjust the orientation of its passes. You can set those either for everywhere the Q110H goes or on a per-zone basis.<\/p>\n