Johnny 5 refuses to use my pathway on my driveway and I can’t figure it out. Maybe someone here can spot the issue. It’s crazy that Johnny travels from 1 side of my yard to the other through the back yard like 8-10 times and uses similar paths every time. It’s flattening my grass in those areas. I add the pathway hoping that Johnny would use it to cut down on some of the long trips around the back of the house.
It’s a little difficult to see in the picture, but does the pathway extend into the area on the left a right couple feet. If not, it might not see it as a connection.
Does it use any Pathway except the one from the Docking Station? I suspect not.
This is one big Area. I don’t believe that Yarbo will use those other Pathways to get from one part of an Area to another part of the same Area. It wants to find a way to the Area and put all the mowing lines in that Area and get to work.
You may be able to force the use of the alternative Pathways using Stubby Deadends and adding them to the start or end of the Work Plan, but that won’t help you while the mower is working in the Area – it’ll still do largely the same as it does now.
Two suggestions (no, three, sir!) that may be worth a shot:
A) Split up the Area into smaller chunks that are mowed independently. That way it won’t create navigation lines from alllll the No-go Zones through that land bridge.
B) Map the Area to include your driveway and put a No-go Zone on the driveway, leaving the strip where the Pathway is outside the No-go Zone. OR use Edit Area to expand the driveway section to include that strip where the Pathway is. It should see that open strip and want to navigate and mow through it, using that strip as part of its navigation calculations. That should ease the number of passes it takes across that land bridge.
C) A bigger (B): Map the whole rectangle and put No-go Zones where the rover shouldn’t go. Any little strips that you keep open “should” be used to help navigate. Yes, it will mow them, and it could be tricky to get the No-go Zones right, but it may work.
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3ft into the area is the best recommendation and it can’t start or end in an overlap.
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I have another one for you… check this. Battery empty at the red X. Could have taken the blue line and go directly to the charger. But it decided to follow the red line, take a pathway up top, go around and come back…
All those pathways are more than 3feet at start and finish, they don’t start and finish in overlap areas (although they do cross overlapping areas).
Tried many many times and it always seem to pick the farthest pathway?? Here it is almost 15 minutes if you take the red line versus 80 seconds if you take the red…
Any idea?
Here is my take. And keep in mind I’m an outsider looking in.
I think Yarbo was in the overlap between two work areas when battery went to I assume 20%. Given that, Yarbo would have to pick which work area it was in and create a route to the charging station. It appears it picked the “wrong” work area to use the blue line.
And YES it didn’t do a very good job picking the shortest route to the charger from the work area at the top. And that may be an understatement.
I don’t like overlaps from a coding perspective it just makes things difficult. If there was no overlap when the battery went to 20%, Yarbo could have gone straight-ish to the charger. But who knows where it would have gone…
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If you have a time and date that occurred I would open a ticket. That doesn’t sound right at all.
I like your theory of it being in an overlap, but even if we assume it thought it was in the area above, there are still multiple other shorter routes home than the one it took. That said, I don’t have a better answer - support ticket time.
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Yes it was on the overlap (need that else there will be a strip of grass uncut between two areas).
But still, there was a pathway right beside it, and it could have taken at least 4-5 better pathways…
Not the first time it happens, just the first time I was able to capture it. I’ll open a ticket (another one!).
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I’ve observed this as well. I have two pathways going from my front yard to the easement in front of my yard. There are no overlaps between them. The mower has always taken the same pathway even if it finishes in the easement area right next to the other pathway. I have played around with it but gave up.
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Just for the benefit of others. There is nothing wrong with area overlaps and they’re almost required to avoid small a strip of skipped grass between the areas. Something else is going on that’s causing this routing error.
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Alternating use of pathways has been requested several times to reduce the run-in tracks in the grass. Yarbo has acknowledged it, but nothing has changed yet.
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I have two work areas that come together without an overlap. It was blind luck that I have them so close together. And the fact that I can’t drive Yarbo straight does mean there are a couple areas where they deviate away from each other.
My point was overlaps just add complexity to the coding. More for the developer to anticipate and code.
Yarbo should be able to handle it and likely will do better over time with firmware enhancements.
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It goes beyond overlapping zones however. When you have multiple pathways in a zone, Yarbo rarely picks the fastest one. In my case it seems to favor almost always the same one. I say almost because sometimes, for whatever reason, it will pick another one… More often than not because it is the farthest one and this time the closest one would have been the “usual one…”… Not kidding… The solution of using deadends at the beginning and and of work plan is great, for the beginning and the end of a work plan, but for large areas that need 2-3 charging to complete, it doesnt help. In my case the return to base can increase by 10-15 minutes (I’ve seen 20 once!) the mowing time… When I see it, I take control manually and move it closer to base…
Not a deal breaker, but removes from the “hands off” experience… And it is super odd to see the robot do a 500m or even more detour when it could have taken a 20m route…
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Absolutely no disagreement. There’s enough odd behavior for everyone to get some 
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Now it’s just messing with you. 
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Hi. I recieved their reply which is very unsatisfactory. They seem to suggest that we can only draw one pathway between each area. This is false. And this is not what is advertised. I is not ok to let the customer believe that the abnormal behavior of the robot is “normal” rather than to consider a bug. This is a bug and it needs to be fixed. Here is there reply (please show this wrong with examples from your maps):
Hi Michaël,
Thank you for sharing the screenshot of your mapping area. Upon reviewing it, we noticed that there are multiple pathways connected to a single working area. This can cause confusion for Yarbo when determining the correct route, making it difficult to set the route algorithm accurately.
To ensure smoother operation and proper routing, we recommend that you create only one dedicated pathway between each working area and also one between the docking station and the nearest working area. This will allow Yarbo to use a clear, dedicated route for traveling between zones and returning to the docking station.
Once this adjustment is made, Yarbo should operate more efficiently and reliably across your yard.
Please let us know once updated or if you need help with editing the map.
Warm regards,
Chris
Team Yarbo
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That’s response is not making sense to me. We’re all using multiple pathways.
Here’s a couple quick examples from my map.
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And does it use them all? (the pathways?)
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One approach Yarbo could use would be to determine all routes to the charging station from its current location. Then choose the shortest one.
This approach may be better than assuming there is only one path to the charging station. (In this case the long way.)
On the surface this seems like a decent idea however, it doesn’t take into account the many requests to vary the path to the charging station.
But at least if you gather all the possible paths to the charging station you then have the ability to pick from possibly many routes. And if there is only one pathway per work area you are picking from a list of 1 option.
Given that some people want random routes and others want the shortest route to get the most mowing done, you probably need an app setting for randomized routes. If randomized routes is on, pick a different route than the last x times. If it’s off always take the shortest route.
I’m sure this approach misses may possible scenarios but it is better than saying you can only have 1 pathway per area.
I can foresee issues with for instance Yarbo being 10 work areas away from the changing station and 10 pathways from each work area to the next. Might take some time to gather all the possible routes and then randomizing becomes a headache.
Sometime just putting possible solutions in writing sparks a conversation on how to fix the issue.
The more ideas that are passed around and the more input that goes into the solution the better it will be.
Hopefully Yarbo developers are harvesting our suggestions here on the forum and applying them to their solutions.
That is my two cents anyway.
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