How does the Dreame A1 Pro find its way without a wire or RTK station?

It uses LiDAR. The Dreame A1 Pro carries a 3D laser scanner, which Dreame calls OmniSense, that measures the distance to walls, fences, trees, hedges and other fixed features around the garden. From those measurements it builds a 3D map and works out where it is on the lawn, so there's no perimeter wire to bury and no RTK aerial to put on a pole. The only thing you install is the charging station.

This has two practical upsides. LiDAR doesn't need a clear view of the sky, so tall trees and the side of a house don't cause the signal drop-outs that satellite-guided mowers can suffer. And because it measures with its own laser rather than recognising images, poor light matters less than it does for camera mowers.

The trade-off is that it needs things to measure against. A large, open lawn with few features close by gives the scanner less to work with. The A1 Pro also has no camera, so Dreame relies on the LiDAR and a front bumper to deal with obstacles; small, low items such as toys and hoses are best cleared before a cut. Dreame doesn't publish a maximum obstacle height or a minimum passage width for this model.

Set-up is done in the Dreamehome app, where you map the lawn and add no-go zones; the app supports two maps. Our navigation guide compares LiDAR with camera and RTK systems in more detail.