Love my yarbo but here is something I think would be an improvement, an “end of driveway” mode. Ideally, it would drive straight in, back straight out, shift over, and repeat. Right now, it tries to do a perimeter pass first, and when it’s dealing with tall snow banks on both sides — especially from the street plow — it can occasionally get stuck while trying to turn. This has only happened when clearing plow berm snow, not during normal driveway clearing, but a straight in/straight out mode would handle that scenario much better.
The snow blower has something called slope mode that does exactly this.
Agreed.
This isn’t exactly what slope mode does. It goes down, turns around, back up the same slope (after lowering the auger..booo), turns around at the top, then goes down a new lane.
We need slope mode with the option to function as multiple dead ends. go down, backup (not turn and go back up), shift, go down, backup, shift.
This can be achieved with sidewalks, but depending on the size of the area, that can be a challenge to map. For slopes, the reversing up the hill would be bad, but I can see the utility of reversing on non-sloped areas. I guess they could add a toggle like they have for sidewalks to not turn and reverse. They’d probably have to rename it from slope mode to something else though.
For the record, I LOVE slope mode 90% of the time. it’s the lowering of the auger and THEN trying to go back up the slope that kills me. It catches and bangs on the slope 100% of the time when it transitions from flat (city sidewalk) to slope up (my driveway).
And I can’t have it just do the slope, since it can’t turn around on the slope.
Hi there, thanks for sharing this suggestion — really appreciate you taking the time to explain the scenario in detail.
At the moment, this isn’t something we’re planning to move forward with right away. In the meantime, you might try Bryan’s suggestion, such as using slope mode or drawing sidewalks, to see if either approach helps better handle that situation.
We’ll also continue to keep an eye on feedback from the community around this idea and share it with the team for future consideration.
Mine constantly gets stuck doing zero turns. There were some end of the season improvements but still some room for improvement.
I’d get stuck too in your 400+ inches of snow a year 
I originally set up a bunch of sidewalks to clear my driveway apron, but ultimately had to get rid of them.
- Yarbo wouldn’t originally raise the auger when reversing up the sidewalk which caused it to occasionally get stuck on un-cleared snow
- Yarbo wasn’t precise in driving backwards, and would occasionally stray into an ajascent un-cleared area and get stuck
- The nail in the coffin was the bug that caused Yarbo to sometimes drive backwards into a sidewalk and/or not reverse out of the sidewalk properly.