To further increase the safe usage of the unit, along with reducing the likely hood of accidental injury caused by not understanding what the unit is doing. Please add additional voice prompts before the unit starts doing anything.
Suggested voice prompts:
- “Caution: Auger starting” ( this is specific for snow blowing, but other attachment specific items fall into the same concept here )
I personally had a safety issue due to this audible alert not being part of the sw.
When I was originally placing my base station. I told the unit to “verify positioning”, and unfortunately I had the snow blower attachment installed, and the unit got stuck.
So, since it had the snow blower on, I believe the unit thought it was stuck by snow.. And turned on the auger without warning.
Unfortunately the unit was stuck because it dug the snow blower into gravel. so when it turned on. gravel started flying. I was unfortunately pretty close to the unit, because I was watching it to make sure things were working properly. But luckily far enough away that nothing bad happened and was able to get it shut off quickly.
Having an audible alert ( at a minimum ) in this case, I believe is safety critical.
Note this would apply to any time the yarbo turned on the auger ( atleast automatically and from the mobile app. Jury is out if it should apply when using the manual controller ).
Even as part of the work plan. Yes the unit is operating autonomously at that point and everyone should be cautious around it, but having that heads up can allow people to move out of any extended danger zone caused by the auger ( or other attachments ) turning on.
- “Caution: Starting to work”
This would be used anytime the unit went from a stopped/paused/idle/stuck state to “active”.
Essentially before the unit starts to move autonomously, even in response to the user telling it to start moving.
There have been many times where my unit has stopped due to a blip in the GPS signal, then when I start walking over to it, it ““randomly”” starts moving again. To me this is rather dangerous as someone could be coming to the unit to start diagnosing it / seeing if its stuck, and then the unit starts moving without warning.
Ultimately more audio prompts should be added to increase the safety of the unit.
I personally see that as
- Unit decides to “start the auger”
- Unit provides audible alert that auger is going to start
- Unit waits a few seconds ( 1~2 probably )
- Unit starts the auger
I do see how some users would not like this behavior, but that, like other settings, can be resolved with toggle settings that users can disable for any audible alerts they do not want to hear.
Please add this option to the 2023 core as well.