Roborock has announced its first robot lawn mower, bringing its indoor mapping expertise to yards without the buried perimeter wire the category required for decades — though US price and an exact release window have not yet been confirmed.
Roborock built its reputation on robot vacuums that map a home's floor and steer around chair legs without dragging a magnetic strip across the carpet. Now the company wants to do the same trick outdoors, and it is betting it can do it without asking homeowners to bury a wire around their lawn first.
The company has announced its first robot lawn mower, a wire-free model. According to CNET's launch writeup, the mower uses satellite positioning and on-board cameras to navigate a yard rather than the buried perimeter cable that has defined the category for decades. The outlet framed the entry as a category expansion rather than a refresh of an existing yard product.
That positioning matters because the robot-lawn-mower market has already moved to wire-free navigation. Established players including Husqvarna's Automower line and newer entrants such as EcoFlow and Mammotion already sell mowers that skip the buried perimeter cable, aimed at homeowners who do not want to trench a wire into their yard. Roborock's brand recognition in indoor robotics gives it a marketing foothold that newer entrants lack, and its installed base of robot-vacuum owners is a built-in audience for cross-category upsell.
The trade-off is that Roborock has not yet published a US price, a release window, or a service-and-warranty footprint. The CNET coverage, a launch-signal piece by editor Ajay Kumar, does not include independent testing of how the new mower performs on uneven ground, in heavy rain, or against the wire-free incumbents that have been on the market for multiple seasons. The article also flags a "future AI-powered mapping update" as a post-launch capability. That phrasing matters: it is a company promise about a feature that has not shipped, not a confirmed feature on the box.
For now, the practical read for a homeowner is that Roborock has joined a category that is no longer asking buyers to dig up their yard. The questions that will determine whether the product is a real competitor to the established wire-free mowers, including price, release date, durability, and how its satellite-plus-camera navigation holds up against three-year-old rivals, are the ones to watch next.