Boundary wire

Wire pinned or buried around the lawn, telling the mower where its zone ends.

Boundary wire

A boundary wire was the standard way to define a limit: the mower follows the signal and turns back. It depends on neither satellite nor camera, which stays reliable under trees, but you have to lay it, repair it when it breaks and move it whenever a bed changes. Recent models replace it with virtual boundaries, which shifts the difficulty onto positioning quality.