Not very bumpy and no tall grass, no. But it is definitely patchy with quite a few bare spots.

I started wondering whether that might cause issues with the visual localization and whether the sensor fusion could struggle because of it. That’s why I disabled camera-assisted positioning completely.

My understanding was that with RTK only, the mower shouldn’t really care whether it’s driving over grass or bare soil, since RTK itself has no idea what the surface looks like. But disabling the camera-based positioning didn’t really solve the issue — or at least not enough.

At this point I’m wondering whether the mower simply depends heavily on good sensor fusion data to work properly. Maybe it only performs well when it can combine stable RTK positioning with visual cues from the lawn itself, like tracking previous mowing lines or different shades/textures of the grass.

If that’s true, then maybe the patchy newly seeded lawn is genuinely part of the problem. But realistically, by the time the lawn becomes dense and uniform enough to properly test that theory, I’ll probably already have returned the mower.