We had some ice spots on the driveway that caused the Yarbo to slip. It would get to the area; tracks would spin and then it would move like it was going around an obstacle type behavior. Once it was moving as normal it would head right back to the same ice-covered spot and the process begins again. It continues this until it runs the battery down and then returns the dock for charge. It would be nice if we had an option that if it can’t get past an area after X attempts it moves on. I can see this being valuable for the other attachments as well. I have seen the lawnmower get OCD on a few spots also but never to the degree as it does with the snowblower and ice.
Since we are on this topic, it would be nice when the unit decides it needs to backup or some other behavior with the snowblower becuase it thinks it is stuck that is continues moving forward as it lowers the snowblower as it resumes the path. Right now it raises the snowblower, backs up, does the hokey pokey then gets to the spot it needs to start blowing again, stops and lowers the snowblower then tries to go forward. If needs to get unstuck, it would be great if it would continue its forward momentum as it lowers the snowblower. Under the current process it takes multiple times to get past its “problem area”. If it had some forward momentum, I think it would have a much better success rate.
I suspect this idea has been added already but I could not find it so I am tossing it out for consideration / add it to the long list.
Yeah, agree. The “how hard to try” settings seems to vary widely, I noticed on the mower it would get trapped and do the hokey pokey all over zero turning and ripping up the grass in some areas. With the snow blower it often tries way too hard doing 1 motion and digs the tracks down causing it to belly out. On a driveway it’s not as big a deal, but it can still sometimes climb a snow mound, and/or plow bank and get stuck the same way. Different “traction control” sensitivities would be fine with me for now, I’d rather manually back it up 5 times during a run then have to go outside to rescue it or ask a friend because we’re out of town😅
Hi there, thanks for sharing your observations and suggestions. I’ll pass your first suggestion to our product team. As for your suggestion about the unstuck behavior, I’ll discuss that with our product team as well.
@B-Mod (we are about 40 miles south of you I think) We got lucky - only 3-4 inches and it was pretty much powder. The wind is packing it down and we have some drifts that are maybe 6-8” (far and few between). So far, it’s the typical babysitting you have to do with Yarbo. Track is slipped alert, “no it isn’t”, clear error, resume and now it’s moving again type stuff. In a couple of the snowdrift areas, I got a new alert “Auger Overcurrent - The snow in this area is too thick. Please allow Yarbo to take a break for a while. (0A002). It does not seem to ever resume on its own with this alert so I have cleared the error and hit resume. Maybe @bryan.wheeler or someone else is familiar with this Yarbo love letter?
Anyways, I sent it out at 4AM manually since the schedule does not work. Not sure you could ever just tell this thing to start in the middle of the night, and you wake up like the commercial says with a clean driveway. I call marketing horse crap on that one right now. Driveway is close to 20K sqft - 58% complete as of this post and charging.
It’s one of those errors that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Like how long should you wait? I’m guessing it’s more overheating vs overcurrent. I’ve heard general recommendations of 30 mins for waiting. I’d maybe slow the core speed down if you can, one notch or tweak the intake settings.
Wait… @Yarbo-Forum are the slipping alerts based on time that the tracks are slipping or distance…it just hit me that it was mentioned that the obstacle avoidance had time based limits. If the track slipping limits are time based rather than distance that could be part of the problems here…
Originally I was thinking to keep speed set to the fastest and let Yarbo manage the speed using the snow intake effect but the last day I’ve been messing with trying to get it to handle deeper snow autonomously and set my speed to the slowest(Yarbo still needs to slow to less than half that speed to handle some of the dense drifts even on turbo) but it seems like it’s getting stuck a little less often. You should have motor feedback, either RPM, track travel distance, etc already if the tracks start slipping it should be detectable almost immediately. Rivian even uses motor feedback to detect road surface conditions and adjust traction and stability control on the fly, something similar may help. Also having speed profiles based on areas/workplans or a 1 time global override could help, but there are bigger issues currently. Sometimes you need the speed to scrape off the pack/ice.
Good question. The slipping alerts are not purely time-based. They’re mainly triggered when the system detects that the tracks are moving (odometry increasing) but the RTK position is not changing, which indicates potential track slip.
When this happens, Yarbo will first attempt to recover autonomously, so there is no immediate app alert during those recovery attempts. Only if the recovery fails after several tries will a slipping or stuck notification appear in the app. That’s why you may see brief struggling without an instant warning.