• A normal lawn mower, one of the many different kinds.Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images
  
  Lawn mowers are essential tools in many homeowners' arsenals. These machines, which ensure your grass stays trim and clean cut, come in many different forms. The different types of lawn mowers all have different common names and each has advantages and disadvantages.
  
  

Traditional Manual-Reel

• The traditional manual-reel lawn mower is one of the original lawn mowing machines that uses no motor or engine. With this old lawn mower, the user simply pushes it along and its two wheels spin turbines which cut up the grass it rolls over. Though they're cheap and use no electricity, they can be somewhat frustrating to use, as the turbines don't cut very sharply and tend to get stuck.
  
  

Normal Push-Type

• Normal, or standard push-type lawn mowers are the ones that most people are accustomed to seeing today. These mowers are pushed with two hands, traditionally have four wheels, and use a gasoline motor or electric engine to power sharp blades that cut the grass it rolls over. It then either stores the cut blades of grass in a sack or just spits them out. It's sometimes also known as a dry rotor lawn mower.
  
  

Ride-Ons

• Ride-on lawn mowers almost look like small cars or tractors. The operator rides on a seat and drives the lawn mower around their lawn while powerful rotors chop at the grass beneath it. Ride-ons are used mostly by people with enormous lawns.
  
  

Robotic

• Robotic lawn mowers mow the lawn all by themselves. These expensive little gadgets rove around your yard, with some of them being solar-powered, cutting at the blades of grass without any need for human operation. They use sensors to detect where they've already cut the grass so they don't cut the same grass twice. However, like any automatic technology, the robotic lawn mowers are prone to running into walls, getting stuck, or just stopping.
  
  

Hover Mowers

• Hover mowers look like normal mowers except without wheels. For locomotion, they use a downward stream of air that lifts the mower a centimeter or so above the surface, allowing users to push them along like hovercraft.