I tried out a robot lawn mower. It didn’t go as planned (opens in new tab)

When I moved into a house in upstate New York after years of living in apartments, I decided to get an old-fashioned reel mower—the kind you push yourself, with no engine to help—for the lawn. The exercise seemed like a good idea at the time. But after spending hours each week covering my half-acre lot, I decided to test the other extreme: a robot mower guided by GPS. Husqvarna, the Sweden-based company that pioneered robo-mowers , let me try out one of its latest versions, the . Like other r...