Are Robot Mowers Safe For Pets And Kids?

When you think about having a robotic lawn mower that autonomously makes it way around your yard, a few questions might pop into your mind. Two of the most common questions being:

1) Is a robot lawnmower safe for my pet?

2) Is a robot mower safe for my kids?

In this article will dive into those questions and try to put your mind at ease if you have young children and/or animals that are outside.

Table of Contents

Traditional Mower Incidents And Stats

Before we dive into just how safe robot lawn mowers are, I thought we’d look a little at the number of incidents and injuries that occur with traditional lawn mowers.

I do want to preface this by saying that I own a riding mower and a push mower, along with my robot mower, so I am not against gasoline or electric mowers in anyway.

A 2018 article found that approximately 9,000 children are injured in lawn mower related accidents each year.
A 2016 study found that around 85,000 adults are admitted to emergency rooms annually with mower injuries.
The most common type of injuries (39%) are cuts.
Burns make up 15% of mower related injuries.

Fingers were the most injured body part, follow by legs, feet and toes.

Ways To Prevent Mower Injury

Keep young children indoors when you are mowing.
Do not allow children under the age of 12 to use a push mower.
Do not allow children under the age of 16 to use a riding lawn mower.
Do not allow children to be passengers on riding lawn mowers.
Teach your kids to understand the possible dangers of a mower.
Teach your kids to understand how a mower works and how to be safe around them.

Why Robot Mowers Are Safer Than Traditional Mowers

It isn’t a secret that the mower in your shed is the most dangerous tool in your lawncare arsenal. Ok, I guess if used strictly to inflict injury, an axe or sledgehammer could beat it out, but you get what I am trying to say. A traditional lawn mower has several moving parts and each one can be dangerous to a child, animal, or even an adult. I don’t think I need to explain how a quickly rotating blade can be a hazard.

So, it is easy to assume that a robotic lawn mower must have some risk as well, right? Actually, not really. Yes, I am sure there is someone dumb enough to find away to injure themselves, by changing the settings or disabling the safety features, but that is kind of on them. For normal everyday use, the robot lawn mower is much safer than a convention mower.

Robot mowers use different cutting styles and technologies which make them safer than traditional mowers. They also use safety features like lift and title sensors, which automatically stop the blades from spinning to avoid injury. There are other sensors that help the robot mower navigate around obstacles.

I wasn’t really able to find any stats about robot lawn mowers injury humans. I guess that is a good sign, right? I will say that robot mowers are still relatively new, so there hasn’t been as much time for people to find ways to hurt themselves. Give us time.

However, a recent report out of the UK found that robot mowers can actually be a danger to the local hedgehog population.

Robot Mower Safety Features

Robot mowers come with several built in safety features that help keep your family and pets safe. As technology continues to advance we’ll see these machines gets smarter and safer as time goes on.

Lift Sensor

A lift sensor on a robot lawn mower is just what it sounds like. If the mower is lifted off the ground for any reason, the blades automatically shut down and stop spinning.
If your child lifts up the mower, or it gets stuck against a stump, or if your wife bumps it with the car when she is backing out, knocking it over, it will trigger the lift sensor and kill the device.

Tilt Sensor

Much like the similar lift sensor, the tile sensor is there to make sure your blades stop spinning should the robot be to off balance or the blades are about to be exposed.

Having a title and a lift sensor make these devices extremely safe. It is almost impossible to get access to the spinning blades with these two safeguards in place on your robot mower.

Perimeter Wire

Pretty much every robot mower on the market comes with a form of perimeter wire that you place underground around your property. This wire acts just like an invisible fence for a dog, except it keeps your robot mower in your yard.

This is a great safety feature for keeping your robot mower in your yard so you don’t have to worry about it running into problems in your neighbors yard.

The perimeter wire isn’t as crucial to safety as the lift sensors which stop the blades from spinning, but it still is a nice feature to have.

Collision Sensors

Yep, another sensor. In the land of autonomous devices, sensors are king. The collision sensor detects any collision that your robot mower might have and instantly shuts the mower off, much like the lift and tilt sensors.

If you have seen a robot mower in action, you know that they don’t mow that quickly. So, even if they do happen to collide with a tree or your favorite garden gnome, they aren’t’ going to do any damage to the object or themselves.

Newer robot mowers are using lidar sensors which can detect objects much quicker and easily make your device slow down or change course as needed.

Blade Position

The blades on a robot mower are tucked up under the device, making them hard to access, even if you found a way to bypass the lift and tilt sensors. The body of the mower forms down around the blades, pretty much right to the ground, so there is no way to access the blades without lifting it up some.

Are Robot Mowers Safe For Pets?

Aside from the random incidents with hedgehogs in England, I couldn’t find any evidence that robot lawn mowers are a danger to pets or animals.

The same safety protocols that protect adults and children are in place to protect pets as well. If your dog is scratching at the robot or trying to tip it over, he won’t be success due to the low center of gravity on the robot mower. Should he be successful in tipping over the robot mower, the sensor will go into affect and shut down the mower. So your dog is now safe from the rotating blades.

In conclusion

In my opinion, which is also kind backed up by the stats and numbers, robot lawn mowers are perfectly safe for children and pets. They are far more safe than their more traditional counterparts.

Having said that, I still don’t typically run the robot mower when my kids are playing in the front yard. That is partial out of concern for their safety, but more so because the mower will have to navigate around them and possibly miss some patches of grass. We don’t currently have a dog, but I would probably have the same thinking for that scenario as well.

What do you think? Do you think robot lawn mowers are safe to run while your kids are in the yard? What about with your pets? Thanks for reading!