The Airseekers Tron is an impressive mulching robot mower with a couple of frustrating flaws

The only thing better than having a great yard to hang out is not having to spend half your free time maintaining it. Today we go beyond setting up an automatic sprinkler or hiring the neighbor’s kid to do some work; today we can deploy robotics to do the job.

The Airseekers Tron ($1999.99 at Amazon) is a capable robot lawn mower that cuts and mulches, for a totally hands-off experience, but there are a few drawbacks to this beast of a mower that keep it from challenging the best in the business.

I tested two separate Airseekers Tron robot mowers over several months, with both bots provided by Airseekers. Here’s what I found out.

The Airseekers Tron is a four-wheel unit that suspends a mower blade in the center. The battery lives in a door at the rear, and there are cameras facing all directions. The blade is a spinning disk with multiple razor-like blades mounted around it.

The true value of the Airseekers Tron as a robot mower lies in its mulching function. Instead of simply chopping grass, it creates a vortex that sucks the cut grass up into a second set of blades that reduce the debris to shreds. With regular mowing, the shreds of grass simply disappear into your lawn. No mess to clean, just short grass.

The Tron is available in three variants: the SE version manages up to 0.37 acres, the standard version manages 0.59 acres, and the Plus version handles one acre.

It is rear-wheel drive, has multi-directional front wheels, IPX6 waterproofing, and a swappable battery. The cutting blade assembly cuts a swath from 8.66-inches up to 11.8-inches wide, and is adjustable from 1.18-inches up to 3.54-inches high. You adjust the blade height in the app and can create custom patterns to cut different sections of your yard at different heights.

Charging the bot is automatic. The charger is a waterproof base station that the bot drives up to on its own. You set the base station before you begin mapping, which locks it into place on the map.

The setup took me about one hour, but be advised that you need tools and that you need to plan out the install. The base station needs power, but so too does the RTK antenna. In my instance, the best place for the base station was near a tree, and the best place for the RTK antenna was a poor place to put the base station — that’s two power sources needed in my yard, then.

You need to screw the base plate and the power tower together to create the base station, screw a mud flap onto the bot, and run wire and build the post for the RTK pod. Plus, there are ground spikes you use to secure the base station to the ground.

Setup is not hard, it just takes a little while to perform. And, don’t forget that these things are heavy. The bot weighs over 40lbs (~18kg), so please bring a friend if you are not prepared to haul that weight by yourself.

On the surface, the Airseekers Tron is made to cut grass. It can handle some light weeds or other simple plants in your grass, but it is a single-purpose machine. This approach allows it to focus on the nuances that your yard can throw at it.

When setting up the Tron, you first manually drive the bot around your space. Outline the edges, one section at a time. The app has two virtual joysticks to control the bot. Remember that with RTK enabled, the mower deploys millimeter-level precision, so take your time and drive accurately. If you run into a plant pot while mapping, the bot will rely on its obstacle-avoidance sensors to avoid hitting the same pot in the future.

After you’ve run the perimeter of your yard, you can use the app to outline obstacles within it. Of course, you can also just let the bot mow and it will automatically identify obstacles as well.

You can drive the bot to multiple yards, or you can drive it all and use no-go and “transit” zones within the map to carve out your spaces. The benefit of splitting up your map is that you can set different schedules per space, and you can control the cut height for those spaces as well.

The Tron is a two-wheel drive machine. The rear wheels are large and grippy, each powered by a strong motor. It can handle inclines up to 65% (33°) and push through taller grass with little hassle. The front wheels are free-spinning omnidirectional, meaning they spin on their axles like normal wheels, but the tire tread consists of a series of rollers. The rollers can spin, so the wheel can rotate forward/backward, while the rollers can spin side-to-side, providing infinite directionality.

The thing is, those front wheels are also a little cumbersome. They are not mounted straight; they are toed in to ~30 degrees. When the bot is driving straight forward, the wheels are not aligned with the movement, and the bot saunters across the yard as if dazed. Worse, the front wheels crush the grass with this action, making it harder for the mower blades to pick back up, and resulting in some wavy, unevenly-cut lines down the yard.

When the bot reaches the edge, it often makes a multi-point turn to head back down the next strip of grass. That turn is multiple “spin-in-place” operations, and since the wheels are not straight, the rollers are not rolling cleanly. To be fair, this spin operation is where the outside front wheel rolls perfectly straight, but the other is dragged at an angle. The causes more distress on the grass than I’d like.

Navigation is simultaneously great and the worst thing about the Tron. RTK truly does offer extremely precise routing. Within that space, the multiple front-facing, two side-facing, and single rear-facing cameras look for obstacles. This works exceptionally well for larger objects; anything as tall as the bot is expertly mowed around.

Smaller objects are where the rails come off. I’ve had to rescue this bot after it tried to run over a stick, got hung up on a brick, tried to suck up some ground sheeting from a space it wasn’t supposed to be mowing, and got wrapped in some electrical cords. In all these cases, the items were shorter than the front bumper of the bot. I’m just glad the frame got stuck on the stick and brick before the blades could contact, and the cords got wrapped around the rear wheel. I remembered to remove the battery before shoving my hand up into the blade assembly to remove the tattered garden ground sheet. No harm done on any of this, but it’s annoying to have to rescue the bot so often.

Finally, how well does it cut? Grass seems to be cleanly sucked up, cut, then further mulched; that’s great. I have a section of grass that has clover growing. My bees love it, so I don’t fight it, but I want it cut to the same length as the grass. The Tron had no problem at all cutting the flower heads off the taller clover, but was unable to suck those flower heads up for mulching.

I also intentionally left a patch of grass to get very long for the Tron to handle. The bits that were six or more inches tall were detected as an obstacle and not cut; the rest was cleanly cut if it got into the blades, but the drag of those front wheels tramped the grass more than anything, so it lay crashed and did not get cut.

Two things to note: I cannot figure out how to change the cutting orientation of the mower, so it will continue to cut length-wise for now, and I can’t figure out how to change my home time zone in the app, so I have to adjust the schedule by a few hours to get the actual start time that I want. These are not deal-breakers, just not ideal.

Homeowners who maintain distinct swaths of flat yard without obstacles or common debris will love this bot. The Airseekers Tron handles ongoing yard maintenance with ease. Map the space, ensure it’s clear, set up automation and schedules in the app, and you never have to think about your yard again. The rain sensor prevents wet mowing, the bot is quick and efficient, and the mulching feature is a game-changer for overall appearance and yard health.

Truly, if I owned a golf course with vast amounts of grass with very little interruption, I’d purchase one Tron per acre of land.

But I, and so many who will be looking at the Tron, do not own a golf course. I have a fairly basic yard, aside from some rock and garden areas around the outside. The only real obstacle in the mowing area is an above-ground pool.

Admittedly, that pool is difficult terrain, with protruding brick on one side and a small drop-off on the other; it’s enough to cause issues as the Tron likes to get stuck there. These are things that could be adjusted via OTA updates, and there have been a few firmware updates during my testing, so I trust that the team at Airseekers team will continue to improve the Tron over time. However, the issues with obstacles, combined with the front wheels being sub-optimal, are serious caveats to consider for a product that is $2,000 MSRP.

As for the competition, I have tested the eufy E15 ($1599.99 at Amazon) in my own yard. It’s a little older and, on paper, far less capable, but it has been maintaining my yard for a while now without the same issues with obstacles and navigation. I can confidently say, however, that the Tron is better at tackling the taller grass at the edges. The E15 allowed that grass to get long, and then identified it as an obstacle, so much of my edging needs hands-on care. Likewise, while I find it easier to modify the map for the E15, the Tron has better battery life.

It’s when you look at newer competition that things get really tricky for the Tron. The brand new Roborock RockMow X120H ($2499 at Amazon) is a capable device that relies on LiDAR for navigation and obstacle avoidance. It’s a little pricier than the Tron, but Roborock has a pedigree in the robot vacuum space, and the RockMow range looks excellent.

There’s also our favorite robot mower right now: the Mammotion LUBA 3 AWD ($2799 at Amazon). If the Tron’s setup complexity and small-obstacle misses are dealbreakers for you, the LUBA 3 AWD is the more forgiving (if pricier) alternative.

In the end, for me, it comes down to the front wheels. The toed-in angle makes perfect sense on paper, but in practice, it is performing very poorly in my yard. I have enough clover and moss in my grass that the yard is too soft, not enough friction to make the rollers operate cleanly, and that added restriction, dragging the rollers along, is causing visible damage to my space. Not to mention, the way the bot makes a multi-point turn at every edge makes the skid-steer approach rough on the grass. These are realities of every robot mower I’ve seen in action, but are exaggerated on my poor-quality grass.

There’s a lot to like about the Airseekers Tron, the mulching function makes it a powerhouse, and there are frequently discounts that take it below the $2,000 asking price. But in an emerging market where robot mowers are swiftly improving, the Tron’s awkward front-wheel setup and questionable obstacle avoidance make it truly great only for very specific conditions.