Small robotic lawn mower for urban gardens: TerraMow Mini 500 review

In Europe, the suggested retail price for the TerraMow Mini 500 is 749 euros. The robotic lawn mower is available directly from the manufacturer as well as on Amazon, optionally as part of a bundle with a garage.

Not everyone can call a garden measuring 1,000 square meters or more their own. Especially in cities, many gardens are significantly smaller. But even here, it is usually worth using a robotic lawn mower so that you do not constantly have to push a conventional lawn mower across the lawn yourself.

With the Mini 500, TerraMow recently launched a brand-new robotic lawn mower without a boundary wire for more compact gardens. It bears a strong resemblance to the likewise fairly new Eufy C15 from Anker and the Natural Expressions Performance 7, which recently impressed in testing. Our review reveals whether the TerraMow Mini 500 can do the same.

The TerraMow Mini 500 is designed for lawns of up to 500 square meters, making it adequately sized for most urban gardens. This positions it below the TerraMow V Series (starting at about 850 euros on Amazon), which had already impressed us in our test last year. With the new Mini 500, the manufacturer is once again relying on AI vision as an alternative to a traditional boundary wire, an RTK antenna, or LiDAR.

The TerraVision 2.0 navigation system uses three front-facing cameras and AI to recognize the lawn autonomously. We will reveal how well this works later in our TerraMow Mini 500 review. First, a few words about the equipment.

The robotic mower cuts with a compact 18 cm cutting disc equipped with three blades, and its cutting height can be manually adjusted from 20 to 60 mm. Electric adjustment is particularly useful when different cutting heights are required in different zones, but it is rarely available in this price range. With a maximum incline of 18 degrees (32.5 percent), the robotic mower is not particularly capable on challenging terrain and is therefore aimed at relatively flat properties. On the other hand, it is relatively compact, measuring approximately 55 x 37 x 27 cm in length, width, and height. At just over 10 kg, it is also pleasantly light and can easily be carried by its handle.

Its low weight also makes it easier to lift out of the box. The box also contains the standard base station with mounting hardware, a power cord, nine replacement blades, and an instruction manual. The garage roof familiar from the earlier TerraMow S and V model series is not included as standard with the new budget model. However, it can be ordered separately for an additional charge and screwed onto the charging station.

We encountered the first surprise as soon as we started. Accustomed to the process from previous tests, we opened the TerraMow app and tried to add the Mini 500. However, when we tapped the device entry, a message appeared stating that the new TerraMow Pro app was required. Anyone who uses one of the older robotic mowers alongside the Mini 500 will therefore have to juggle two apps, as the V and S Series cannot be added to the TerraMow Pro app.

Once the robotic mower had been connected to the app and Wi-Fi after this minor detour, mapping proceeded in the usual manner. However, the process differs from that of many RTK- and LiDAR-based robotic mowers. Instead, TerraMow stays true to its established approach and once again maps the area completely autonomously. It is not entirely automatic, however, as the mowing direction relative to the station must at least be specified before mapping begins.

As we have already seen with previous product lines and Eufy’s robotic mowers, the robotic mower then explores its new territory completely autonomously. It first traverses the lawn in lanes and then revisits individual areas, using its cameras to detect the lawn’s edges. This worked very reliably and accurately in our test, as usual, although mapping our nearly 300-square-meter test area took just under an hour and a half.

This form of mapping is problematic only for lawns that are not enclosed, such as those open to a neighboring property, or for areas that should not be mowed. In these cases, the mapping process can be paused and corresponding exclusion zones positioned on the map as it is being created. Once the lawn has been mapped, the virtual map is saved. Various editing options are then available, including the creation of different zones and exclusion zones in various shapes (rectangle, polygon, ellipse, boundary), among other options.

In terms of maintenance, the TerraMow Mini 500 is conventional. The three blades can be replaced using a screwdriver, which is not included. Thanks to its IPX6 rating, the mower can be cleaned with a garden hose. 

The TerraMow Pro app is largely similar to the old app. The device entry displays the created map, on which live progress is shown while the mower is working. At the bottom, users can select the various modes (Auto, Spot, Zone, Box, and Edge) and start, pause, or stop mowing.

On the right-hand side, alongside map management, live video (once activated), and the map view (terrain on/off), there is also an icon for opening the mowing settings. Here, users can set the mowing mode (General or Customized, with different settings for each zone), the cutting distance from the edge (-15 to 15 cm, unfortunately only for the entire map rather than individually as with Anthbot), the spacing between mowing paths (6, 9, 12, or 15 cm), the travel speed (four levels), and the mowing direction.

As previously mentioned, the TerraMow Mini 500 does not use conventional technologies such as a boundary wire, an RTK reference station, or LiDAR. Instead, it navigates across the lawn entirely by means of its camera-based TerraVision 2.0 triple-camera AI vision system. This had already worked well in our tests of TerraMow’s previous two robotic mower series, and it works well here too.

The TerraMow Mini 500 reliably followed its paths and covered the entire area. Even narrow passages of around 60 cm pose no problem for the compact robotic mower.

We recently tested the very similar Eufy C15 and Natural Expressions Performance 7. Both had already made a good impression with their obstacle avoidance, and the TerraMow Mini 500 does the same.

With its three cameras and AI assistance, it reliably detected all our test obstacles, including a model hedgehog, a tennis ball, and a piece of garden hose, and passed relatively close to them while navigating around them. Many other competitors, some of them significantly more expensive, have struggled at least to some extent with some of these obstacles. In this respect, the TerraMow Mini 500 performed flawlessly in our test.

The TerraMow Mini 500 is designed for small gardens of up to 500 square meters. Its cutting system is correspondingly compact, with an 18 cm cutting width and three blades. It therefore mows in fairly narrow paths, whose spacing can also be adjusted via the app. Based on our hands-on experience, however, it still mowed quite neatly and cleanly, although it proceeds at a leisurely pace at the standard speed setting.

When mowing along edges, the Mini 500, as an affordable model without a separate edge-cutting solution, has the usual problem. The 18 cm-wide cutting disc is centered within the roughly 37 cm-wide robotic mower. In other words, there is a gap of around 10 cm between the cutting disc and the edge of the housing on both the left and right sides. 

This strip will inevitably remain at non-level transitions that the robotic mower can be configured to drive over. In addition, there is some deviation caused by the navigation, although it remains quite precise even along the edge.