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- Spectacularly easy to set up and use
- Easy to carry
- Neat edging…
- …even if it doesn't cut to the perimeter
- Heads in random directions
- Like other robomowers, don’t expect striped lawns
“Does it have to scan the garden first?” That’s the first question I’m asked when talking about robot lawn mowers with friends and family. Of course, in many cases, the answer is yes, but when it comes to the Bosch VISIMOW18V-100, the answer is quite different.
That’s because the compact Bosch requires no setting up at all. You simply place it on your lawn and walk away: no perimeter wires, no complicated app. And in a world full of devices competing for your attention, that’s a breath of fresh air.
It’s available from the usual cohort of retailers, such as Amazon and Currys as a bare tool or as a kit with a battery and charger. The kit, as tested, costs £444, which is only fractionally more than the Yard Force EasyMow 260B, and without the battery, it’s a bargain £300. But does it do the job? And is it among the best robot lawn mowers on sale? Let’s find out.
What do you get for the money?
I tested the Bosch VISIMOW18V-100 kit, which bundles a 4.0Ah 18V battery and charger. The battery hails from the Power For All Alliance, meaning its battery can be shared across a wide range of brands, including Husqvarna and Gardena. That’s important, because it increases the likelihood of you already having one – and makes future compatible purchases like the Bosch UniversalGrassCut 18V-26-500 cheaper.
Elsewhere in the box, you’ll find the manuals, and spare blades, which as is typical with robotic mowers, look more like tiny razor blades than traditional mower blades.
At 429 x 348 x 226mm, it’s pretty much the same size as the Lawnmaster VBRM16, although at 6.9kg, it’s very slightly heavier. But it has a comfortable handle, and you’ll be using that because the Bosch doesn’t have a dock like more expensive mowers, so you’ll be carrying it to and from your shed. I found it compact enough to store on a shelf or under my workbench, keeping it out of the way.
The supplied battery is compact and lightweight, and the VISIMOW18V-100, as its name suggests, packs 18 volts. One of the few drawbacks of the Power For All battery is that it’s only available as a 4.0Ah unit, so there’s no way of theoretically increasing the coverage. Still, for a good number of people, 100m2 will be more than enough. And at 44dBA, it’s very quiet, too.
It uses a blend of cameras plus ultrasonic and bump sensors to amble around the garden, meaning it can bounce off walls and detect grassed and non-grassed areas, plus obstacles in its way, such as pots or children’s toys. Cutting height is adjustable from 20-60mm in 10mm increments.
Is it difficult to set up?
It’s hard to see how a robotic mower could be any easier to use. You simply charge the battery (it comes partially charged), then pop it into the dock, which is under a flap at the rear of the mower and select your cutting height from the large rotary dial.
Once that’s done, you press and hold the power button and select from one of its two mowing modes. AutoMow does precisely that: it will head off in straight lines and when it encounters the edge of the lawn or an obstacle, it’ll stop, turn in a random direction. The thinking here is that, while there’s no smart intelligence, it will achieve 100% coverage by the time its battery expires – or of course, if you tap the big red stop button.
SpotMow mode allows you to mow specific areas 2m2 in size. In either mode, it’s possible to switch off the cameras if it’s preventing the VISIMOW from accessing particular areas.
How did I test the Bosch VISIMOW18V-100?
I tested the Bosch VISIMOW18V-100 in the same way I test all the robot mowers I review: by setting up and using the mower as any consumer would, being careful to take note of how easy or difficult the setup process was and how the mower performed during the time I had to test it.
For this particular robot, I had it on test at the same time as two other robot lawn mowers (the Segway Navimow X430 and the Bosch VISIMOW18V-100) and reviewed all three over the course of a couple of months during June and July 2026.
I used each mower on several different lawns to see how they would cope in different conditions, taking particular note of how efficiently they mowed, how long the battery lasted in each case, how good object avoidance was, and how closely the mower was able to mow to edges.
When testing any robot lawn mower, I also consider how much it costs and how this compares to some of its closest rivals in a fiercely competitive market, as well as additional factors such as how easy it is to carry around and the quality of the accompanying app (if any).
How well does it mow the lawn?
Like many other robotic lawn mowers, the Bosch VISIMOW18V-100 does require the lawn to be cut at a relatively consistent 80mm or less. That means you’ll need to keep a conventional lawn mower or grass trimmer handy for the first cut of the year.
While it’s perfectly capable of hacking grass at around 80mm, its happy place is trimming around 10mm at a time. At that length, the clippings are relatively minimal, and provide decent mulch. Like other robomowers, it doesn’t collect clippings.
I tested the Bosch VISIMOW18V-100 on several lawns. The first measures around 60m2, and took around 90 minutes to achieve total coverage. It wasn’t fazed by a box hedge border, the concrete path running to the other side or a rockery, consistently avoiding all three. This lawn falls away into a sharp dip in one corner, and the Bosch needed manually retrieving on a couple of occasions, despite its best efforts to free itself. That’s not a problem if you’re out there with the mower, but if you leave it to mow while you’re at work, it may well get stuck. Bosch says it’s able to tackle slopes up to 19 degrees.
Better was its performance around a steel manhole cover and a patch of brown grass. It recognised both, stopped mowing and started again once it detected it was back on the green grass. The way it deftly negotiated the brown grass impressed me, and if your dog frequently heads outside for its morning ablutions, it can still cut the resulting brown patches by disabling the camera.
It eventually mowed a longer patch of grass that I’d missed, but only after nibbling away at it over a period of time as it mowed a few more blades each time it detected the clump as an obstacle.
The second lawn was around 30m2, and I left it for several hours to work. Once I’d returned, the battery had expired, but it had mowed the lawn to a high standard, although as with most robot lawn mowers it did leave a 20-30cm band of longer grass around the perimeter, so I had to run out with a conventional mower to trim everything to a consistent length. But because it left short, neat, straight runs, it only took me a few minutes. There was no scalping and the cuts were clean.
The Bosch VISIMOW18V-100 won’t stripe your lawn, so you’ll need a conventional cylinder mower if you have aspirations of becoming a Lord’s groundkeeper. It’s also worth noting that the manual is very prescriptive regarding borders, so I was a little apprehensive that it would blunder into flower beds, but I needn’t have worried.
Under official guidance, patios, paths and driveway borders must be wider than 35cm; if they’re less, you’ll need to install a vertical border of at least 6cm. I didn’t have cause to do any of this, although it would certainly be a good idea if you have a sunken pond or a terraced lawn.
While I didn’t test it on wet grass, there’s nothing in the instructions to say you can’t – although common sense is required, and a damp lawn will reduce the runtime. An IPX5 rating means it’s sufficiently waterproof to run in the rain, but I wouldn’t let it loose in a heavy downpour.
Should you buy the Bosch VISIMOW18V-100?
If you’re looking for a simple-to-use, deploy-and-forget robotic mower, the Bosch VISIMOW18V-100 is a fantastic bit of kit. It’s light enough to be carried to and from the lawn by many elderly or infirm gardeners, and it’s so straightforward that it’s hard to be flummoxed by the controls.
I’d like to see a little more order to how it rotates and heads off in a different direction, but once I had faith that it wouldn’t cut my chrysanthemums, I was happy to leave it alone for a few hours, safe in the knowledge that the bulk of my mowing would be done when I got back. And even if it continually misses a patch, the SpotMow function is useful in addressing that.
Like other robotic lawn mowers, particularly those that aren’t app-controlled or require a perimeter line, it won’t cut straight to the borders, but the edges were at least neat. So don’t go selling your conventional mower on Facebook Marketplace just yet.
If you can live with trimming the edges yourself, I think that there’s little else quite as simple, convenient and effective for this money. If you have a small garden, it’s one of the best robotic mowers I’ve tested.
