Some people really enjoy mowing the lawn. Maybe it’s a meditative thing for them. A quiet ritual of dominance over grass. I don’t know. But I am not one of those people.

Mowing the lawn, to me, has always felt like a chore. And I’ve done it all, from corded electric mowers that require extension cord wrangling like a circus act, a gifted zero-turn mower that constantly breaks and now lives in the shed like a wounded animal, even outsourcing it to lawn crews who show up like a tactical strike team and leave behind the smell of gas and the sound of disrupted peace. I’ve tried every version of “let’s just get the dang grass cut,” and none of them have felt particularly great.

So this year, I did something I’ve been thinking about for a long time: I bought a robot to mow my grass.

Its official name is Zodd, because the app wouldn’t let me pick Zod (minimum four characters). Zodd is a Mammotion Luba 2 AWD, specifically the 3000H model. It’s a chunky machine with all-wheel drive, a camera on top, and the personality of a helpful mule. We like Zodd.

For years I’ve followed the robotic lawn mower space. The early models relied on you burying a boundary wire in the ground like some kind of cursed treasure map. And if you had a dog fence that already ran off a similar wire, it was a whole thing. Managing wires underground is not something I want to do. Sure, you could stake the wire to the grass and avoid burying it, but my kids will trip on it.

What changed is that the tech got better. No more boundary wire. Instead, you pair your phone to the robot via Bluetooth and manually drive it around your yard like you’re in a remote control car game. That builds the boundary map. The robot then uses a satellite totem pole to know where it is at all times. That pole must never move. Ever. If it does, the robot’s whole sense of the universe collapses and you’re back to square one.

To my surprise, from unboxing to having the robot mow a patch of grass took maybe 15 minutes. That part was wild. Then I spent the next few hours (across a few days) mapping out nine different mowing zones in my yard, which is just over an acre in a very non-linear kind of layout. There are trees, sheds, gardens, and lots of “no-go” zones where I don’t want a spinning disc of blades to roam.

So far, Zodd has been mowing for a full season, starting around April. I don’t use the automatic schedules, even though they exist. I just open the app, look at the grass, and decide where Zodd should go today. Zodd listens. Zodd goes. Zodd cuts.

The Luba 2 AWD has chunky wheels with real suspension and what I think are called omniwheels, which help it pivot. My yard isn’t perfectly flat, and Zodd handles uneven terrain without complaining. The camera helps it avoid obstacles, which is great when you have young kids who leave their entire lives strewn across the lawn. It does sometimes get spooked by shadows, but software updates have steadily made that better.

Sometimes Zodd gets stuck on a branch. Sometimes cloud cover makes it lose its positioning. It’ll notify me when that happens. It’s heavy, so you do need two hands to rescue it. But for the most part, it just… works. And when it’s low on battery, it quietly returns to its little home to recharge and then picks up where it left off.

There are still areas of the yard it can’t get to: edges near fences, tight paths, weird corners. So every couple weeks I still do some weed whacking, but it’s minimal. Honestly, I don’t mind it. Compared to pushing a mower in 95-degree humidity, it’s practically relaxing.

The bigger worry in my mind is: what happens next season? What happens when the cloud service gets sold or someone decides to add a subscription fee? What if the company pivots or disappears? There’s a fragility in the digital infrastructure that powers Zodd, and I wholly acknowledge that. I hope I can get a few good years out of him before any of that falls apart.

Zodd has saved me days-worth of time this summer. And more than anything, he’s saved me the mental friction of trying to figure out how I’m going to get the grass cut this week. I don’t love lawn care. I just want the result. And Zodd delivers the result.

Not perfectly. But reliably, quietly, and without sweat.

So yeah, I recommend the Mammotion Luba 2 AWD. Especially if, like me, mowing the grass is something you have to do, not something you want to do. Zodd mows the lawn so I don’t have to. And that’s good enough for me.