Reported injuries during self-driven turns: what is on the record, and what is not

What the report says

A Sveriges Radio report from P4 Kristianstad describes a robot mower reversing over a 15-month-old boy in Haväng, in southern Sweden. His father found him with a bloodied knee and slashed shoes after the family's mower had backed over him. The report states that the mower has no sensors behind it, and that it carries on mowing while it reverses¹. DataNova, the general agent, said it takes the incident seriously and would not comment further until it had examined the mower¹.

The machine is in the picture. The photograph published with the report shows a Mammotion LUBA 2 AWD, plainly enough to identify the model. The report's own words name no manufacturer and no model, so the machine is identified by the image rather than by the text¹ — and DataNova, which describes itself on its own site as “Sweden's official general agent for Mammotion”³, is the company the broadcaster asked about it.

The report is a 1:52 audio item with a written summary, and our quotes are from that summary rather than from the audio.

What owners described

In a thread about firmware 2.3.30.39 on LUBA 3, two commenters describe a European incident in which a child was run over during an automated multi-point turn, both saying the machine has no sensor behind it².

Both accounts are second-hand: neither commenter says they were there, and neither gives a country, a date, a model or a firmware version. They may be describing the July incident above — nothing in either source connects them, so we do not.

What regulators have already done

This is not a worry only owners have. Two robot mowers have been through the EU's alert system in the years we have read (2020 on) — both about blades that keep turning when a sensor fails, and both naming children or bystanders:

• A robot mower sold as “Robot Lifestyle” — December 2022, notified by Luxembourg. Its lift and tilt sensors may fail to switch it off, leaving the blades exposed: “the mower can drive onto the foot of a child without stopping the blades.” Sale banned, online listings removed⁵.
• Honda Miimo, models HRM1000–HRM4000 — November 2024, notified by France. A sensor mount can stick, so obstacles are not detected: “users or bystanders, including children, can cut themselves.” Recalled from owners⁶.

Both notices are short and public: the Robot Lifestyle one and the Honda Miimo one.

The same Miimo fault was recalled in the UK in September 2024 — “the sensor may not detect objects in its path”⁷ — and the US recalled a robot mower in 2008 whose blades kept rotating when it was lifted, with room for a foot to reach the blade, and one injury reported⁸.

Searching the EU's alert system¹⁰, Sweden's consumer agency⁹ and the UK and US registers, we found nothing against Mammotion itself, DataNova has published no statement about either incident⁴, and Mammotion's own news page carries no mention of either¹¹.

What to take from it

The gap both accounts describe is built into how these machines work. The sensors look forward and around; an automated turn or a reversing move takes the mower where you are not standing; and a lift or tilt sensor is what is supposed to stop the blades when the machine leaves the ground. Every notice above is about that last part failing.

So: don't leave a mower turning or reversing with a child or a pet nearby, and don't count on it to notice what is in the space it backs into.

We are not linking either injury to the number or pace of Mammotion's updates. The sequence of updates is a matter of record on the firmware pages; the reason for it is not something we know.