So a couple of days ago, we got some fairly wet snow. Too wet to effectively snowblow, so instead I had Yarbo plow the snow & slush. Great. Worked perfectly!
Fast forward to today - I decided to have Yarbo clean up the snow drifts and get rid of the mounds of plowed snow on the sides of the driveay. So I sent him out to take care of it.
It was unusual - Yarbo kept getting snagged and pulled into the snow drift. He would end up in the grass aside the driveway, then throw an out of bounds error. Ok. I’d log in, lift the auger, then just back him out of the drift & back onto the driveway. Start him up again. He’d end up getting pulled in again & get stuck. This went on again and again, and I had planned to comment about it here and how the algorithm needs to be adjusted - Why does Yarbo keep driving until it gets out of bounds? It should STOP and reverse BEFORE it gets out of bounds. Makes sense, right??
Anyway, when I went outside to take out the trash, I walked by Yarbo on his dock, and noticed that half of the auger was pretty much filled with snow. Hmm. That’s odd. Pulled out my phone and turned on the auger to clear the snow. And that’s when I saw that one side of the auger’s sheer pins had been snapped. So now I know why Yarbo kept getting pulled into the snow banks!
TLDR: This highlights two issues that should be addressed…
1). Yarbo’s algorithm should be smart enough to stop the robot when it starts drifting out of bounds, then simply reverse it back into the authorized zone. No good excuse for the ‘out of bounds’ errors to occur.
2). Yarbo needs a hall sensor or something to detect when the auger isn’t spinning due to sheer pin failure. Crazy to think that the robot would be happy to just keep on going trying to clear the driveway with an auger that doesn’t even spin.
