Yuka Mini 2 1000 Review

On a market where robot mowers grow steadily bulkier, the Yuka Mini 2 1000 takes the opposite bet. Mammotion's compact machine uses LiDAR to guide itself through the tightest gaps in awkward gardens, and adds a DropMow mode that lets it cut areas which are not on its map at all, while still claiming coverage of up to 1000 m². It was run from April to the end of July on a 344 m² plot, which is long enough to find out what that small format costs at the point of cutting.

Mammotion is a young Chinese brand, founded in 2022, and its catalogue is far tighter than some rivals'. For its 2026 season it lists seven main models across two families. The Luba machines use all-wheel drive to tackle steep ground; the Yuka range targets residential gardens with lighter machines built to slip into fragmented plots. The Mini 2 1000 sits at the top of that second family, combining a 360-degree LiDAR and two cameras with a deliberately compact body.

Robot mowers tend to look alike: bulky, ovoid, almost always dark. Mammotion is one of the few manufacturers that does not follow. The Yuka Mini 2 makes the point with a slim white shell, a rounded front and a rear that narrows over cleated wheels overhanging the chassis. Even the red stop button trades the usual rectangle for a hexagon.

The silhouette is genuinely small: 52 x 41 x 28 cm for barely 11 kg. For comparison, the Navimow i208 measures 63.5 x 44.5 x 28.8 cm and approaches 15 kg. Despite the contained size, build quality is excellent, with thick panels and a shell that fits together precisely, and a moulded handle makes the occasional carry easy.

With no perimeter wire and no RTK antenna, installation is quick. Screw down a charging station, connect over Bluetooth, then Wi-Fi, and the robot is ready to take stock of the ground. Two mapping methods are offered: manual, where the mower is driven along the boundary by joystick, and automatic, where it traces the outline itself using LiDAR.

Automatic mapping now features on most recent machines, and it is not always the safe choice, because the technology is not consistently mature and it assumes clear ground with crisp boundaries. The 344 m² test plot met neither condition, with a gravel parking area on one side and a long crooked line fringed by vegetation on the other. The Yuka nonetheless traced the lot accurately, requiring only a few corrections afterwards. Once the map exists, it is refined with the now-standard tools: no-go zones to protect beds, virtual fences to stop the robot crossing a limit, and corridors to link two stretches of lawn without mowing what lies between them.

Within the Yuka family, the Mini 2 is the first to use LiDAR. Its predecessors relied on NetRTK, a satellite guidance system that needs a permanent internet connection to stay precise. Here a rotating LiDAR dome sits on the lid, scanning 360 degrees out to 60 metres, backed up by two 1080p cameras that judge the immediate surroundings.

The pairing works. Under trees and along walls — two situations that routinely unsettle satellite positioning — the Yuka kept its bearings throughout. It was equally composed around obstacles, whether permanent or improvised: a terrace chair moved onto the grass, a hosepipe protruding slightly into the mowing zone. It dodged them every time, including the low ones that almost blend into the lawn.

The best example was a second zone linked to the main plot. Reaching it means following a narrow dirt path roofed by low-hanging branches, a setting where plenty of robots have previously given up, some judging the gap too tight, others reading the branches as impassable obstacles. The Yuka Mini 2 went through without difficulty, repeating the round trip across successive mows.

Darkness is no obstacle to LiDAR, since it works by laser scanning. The cameras need more help, so Mammotion has added a three-LED strip that switches on automatically at dusk or on demand from the app. Lighting of that kind is far from universal in the category and is genuinely useful for night mowing.

Turned over, the Yuka Mini 2 reveals two cleated rear wheels and two free wheels at the front, a conventional layout. It is the compact body that makes the difference, letting the machine work where larger robots struggle. In a fragmented garden it turns on the spot without a run-up and goes after grass in blind corners, and even awkwardly shaped no-go zones were skirted precisely, right up against the drawn line.

That dexterity does run out on steep ground. The 45% figure the brand quotes looks a little optimistic. On the steepest bank of the test plot, rising towards the terrace, the robot occasionally stalled, spinning and hunting for grip. It always freed itself, but at the cost of some time.

Nothing here is disqualifying. Across four months it needed a hand only three or four times, always in the same place, at the foot of an old willow with protruding roots. For a genuinely steep garden, the all-wheel-drive Luba family is the better direction.

The Mammotion app is not a maze, and its many options are easy to find. Usefully, the Yuka Mini 2 supports a live video feed, which is still not a given even though these robots all carry cameras. It is handy for keeping an eye on the garden, or for looking at the scene when an incident notification arrives, at which point control can be taken over through virtual joysticks to try to resolve the problem. This is also where the LED strip earns its place, since it makes night patrols possible. Unlike some rivals, though, no photo is captured automatically when motion is detected.

That video comfort depends entirely on home Wi-Fi. As soon as the robot strays too far, the stream becomes unavailable. Two answers exist: extend coverage with repeaters, or add Mammotion's optional 4G module, which frees the robot from the house network and unlocks control from anywhere. That means starting a mow while away from home, or locating the machine if it is stolen. Mammotion includes three years of the service, then charges an annual fee, which is on the steep side; Segway, by contrast, fits 4G as standard across its Navimow i2 family, with a smaller annual charge once the first year is up.

The rest of the settings do not disappoint. Pass spacing runs from 8 to 12 centimetres, and the stripe angle, number of perimeter laps and obstacle-detection sensitivity across three levels are all adjustable. Each zone takes its own parameters, so the front of the house can be treated differently from the plot at the back.

One control escapes that generosity. Cutting height is set only by hand, using the dial on the lid. Raising the blades remotely before a hot spell is therefore impossible, as is varying the cut from one zone to another, which is a surprising omission on a machine of this specification.

This was the main worry: does the small format cost the Yuka Mini 2 at the point of mowing? The answer needs some nuance. Its deck, carrying five pivoting blades, is fairly narrow at roughly 19 centimetres in diameter, where rivals offer at least 22 cm. The consequence is straightforward: for a given area it needs more passes.

Edges spoil the picture a little as well. Because the deck is centred beneath the chassis with no offset, a band of grass always survives along walls and fences. Mammotion has provided a software workaround: the app shifts the robot's trajectory outward in steps worth a quarter of its width, up to the point where it runs on the boundary itself. That only works where the border is flush, such as a terrace level with the lawn.

Faced with a vertical obstacle like fencing or a step, those settings will not work miracles, and between 10 and 20 centimetres will remain to be tidied by hand depending on the boundary type. That is consistent with the average for robots without a second disc or a dedicated solution, such as the string trimmer on the Ecovacs Goat O1200.

The narrow cutting width is partly offset by pace. The robot mows at 0.3 m/s by default, a conventional speed, but the slider goes up to 0.6 m/s. Speed control of that sort is far from universal and is welcome when a small area needs a quick tidy. As for the result, the grass comes out uniformly cut with no missed tufts, and no area is left behind, the robot returning at the end of a cycle to the sections it skipped along the way.

New to the 2026 generation and deployed across both the Luba and Yuka lines, DropMow remains a rarity among Mammotion's direct competitors. It allows the robot to mow an area that has not been mapped.

The procedure is simple: carry the Yuka Mini 2 to the target area, press the mow button and then start, and it gets to work, tracing parallel lines aligned to its starting orientation with its sensors still watching for obstacles.

The mode earns its keep on small secondary areas, such as outlying patches that no corridor can connect to the rest of the garden. On the test plot it handled the square of grass beside the bins, which could not be attached to the map. The work is admittedly less precise than mapped mowing, since the robot simply rakes the area without tidying its outline, and once finished it stops where it is and must be carried back to its station. It nonetheless saves the chore of dragging out a conventional mower for a few square metres.

In a similar spirit, though not exclusive to Mammotion, the Yuka Mini 2 also offers a manual mowing mode in which the robot is joystick-guided to cut spots missed by the map or adjacent unmapped areas. Pleasingly, travel speed is unlocked to 1.2 m/s in that mode, double the autonomous ceiling, so tidying up does not consume the whole morning.

This was the other point of suspicion. With a modest 6.1 Ah battery, the Yuka Mini 2 manages roughly two hours of work before heading off to refuel, and a full charge then takes between 2 hours 15 and 2 hours 30. On the 344 m² zone that worked out at approximately 200 m² covered per charge under basic mowing conditions. With the settings pushed — maximum speed and tighter passes — the figure falls back towards 150 m².

In practice, maintaining the test plot took around five hours in the best conditions, intermediate charging included, and up to six or seven hours with more demanding settings. Scaled to the 1000 m² the robot claims, that becomes a minor marathon: around twenty hours at best, and potentially close to thirty with the settings pushed.

A garden under 500 m² can still work comfortably. If you intend to use the Yuka Mini 2 across its maximum area, it is better to divide the ground into three or four zones and spread the work over the week.

By way of compensation, Mammotion has thought carefully about charging. The ceiling adjusts between 80 and 100% to spare the cells over time, recharging can be scheduled for off-peak hours, and the return-to-station threshold moves between 15 and 30%. An Intelligent option even lets the robot take on only the energy it needs to finish its zone rather than waiting for a full charge.

On durability the Yuka Mini 2 earns an excellent repairability score of 9 out of 10, which is rare in this category and reflects spare parts already stocked in the brand's own shop, including replacement blades, the cutting disc and a front wheel. The battery is accessible and can be changed at home, held in by a few screws. Three years of warranty cover the main components, the battery included.

Within the range, the Yuka line runs to two models: this Mini 2 1000, and the Mini 2 800, which drops the LiDAR in favour of three cameras and covers 800 m². Its direct rivals are the Navimow i208 LiDAR from Segway, the Mova LiDAX Ultra 1000 and the Ecovacs Goat O1200 LiDAR Pro.