Not any more, on a large part of this shelf — and the wire is still the more predictable of the two approaches.
What each approach relies on
A boundary wire robot follows a signal in a loop of cable you lay around the lawn. The machine knows one thing very reliably: whether it is inside the loop. It knows almost nothing else, which is why the classic wire robot mows in a semi-random pattern and needs hours to be sure it has covered everything.
A wire-free robot has to answer the same question by other means, and there are three families of answer in the shops. Satellite positioning with a fixed reference station, which is accurate in an open garden and confused under a mature tree. Camera-based vision, which recognises grass against not-grass and is affected by light and by an overgrown edge. And laser scanning, which maps structures well and has less to say about where a lawn ends and a border begins.
Most machines combine two of these.
Where each one fails
The wire fails mechanically: a spade through it in spring, a rotavator, a fence post. The failure is total and finding the break is the job nobody enjoys.
Wire-free machines fail situationally: the same garden works on a bright dry day and not under a wet canopy, or the machine loses the reference and parks. The failure is intermittent, which is harder to diagnose than a cut cable.
What the wire still buys
Certainty at the border. A physical loop does not care about light, tree cover or how tall the grass at the edge has grown. In a garden with a pond, a gravel bed the same colour as a dry lawn, or a drop, that certainty is worth the afternoon it takes to lay.
What neither of them does
Cut to a hard edge. Every robot leaves a strip, and the shears and the edging shelves here exist partly for it.
How this site handles it
The robot family here prints the navigation method the maker states, whether a boundary wire is required, supplied or optional, and what the maker says about slopes and about rain. The boundary wire and peg shelves are separate families, because on a wire installation they are a real and recurring purchase.
The questions that keep coming in
Is a wire-free robot always easier to install?
Easier to lay out, yes — there is nothing to peg down. Harder to correct: when a wire robot goes somewhere it should not, you move the wire. When a camera or satellite robot does, you are editing a map and hoping the machine agrees with it.
Can I add a wire to a wire-free machine?
Generally not — the machine has no perimeter input. What most of them offer instead is a virtual no-go zone drawn in the app, and how well it holds depends on how well the machine knows where it is.
Last reviewed 26 September 2026