I use yarbo to snowblow my father in laws property as he is getting older and it helps, when it doesn’t get stuck.
My father in law has a dirt driveway and a big yard that yarbo does as one of his daughters lives behind his house and she drives through a section of the lawn to get her place. The yard is uneven in places as well as the driveway.
I have researched online on different ways to prevent yarbo from getting stuck in the snow to include counter balance and re mapping.
I currently have a sandbag on top of yarbo to add extra weight for traction. I thought it was helping until this big storm hit and now yarbo gets stuck everywhere. I thought it may have been due to the turning but once an area was clear, if it had less than 0.5 inches of snow it runs off it gets stuck and digs itself in. This makes my father in law have to go out and rescue yarbo multiple times and ultimately he has to manually snowblow himself.
Has anyone come up/thought about putting a linear actuator on yarbo that can be controlled through wifi in a last ditch effort to get it unstuck? Where the actuator is activated it would tilt/lift yarbo up to give it enough traction to get unstuck.
I currently cut out all the sharp corners in my map and have the module set to ~0.65 as many users indicated this was a good height.
At this point I am just trying to come up with creative options to not have my father in law have to get yarbo unstuck all the time.
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What patterns are you running with what throwing directions? Do you have areas broken up? If there’s heavy snow I found setting speed to the lowest helps, which you can set now per area, pathways and sidewalks separately.
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Don’t know if this will help but I’ve noticed that setting the height of the blower unit at 1.4 inches places the rover tracks directly on the ground which gives it the most balanced traction. Of course, at that height, it’s not going to take care of snow anything below 1.4 inches. I tried 0 inches and it gets stuck all the time. A position that mostly worked for me is between .4 and .8 of an inch.
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I’ll have to try setting the speed lower to see if it helps. I have run multiple settings/throwing directions to get it not to do sharp turns. The yard is a big section and I can try and divide it into multiple areas to see if it helps.
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I have been able to get it unstuck remotely by moving the module while reversing or moving forward and came up with the same height as well.
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If this becomes a problem in the future, I already have some plans for an “unstuck-o-matic.” My first thought was to use a linear actuator, but then I realized it doesn’t need to be linear. A windshield wiper motor (or something similar) could be rear-mounted with “leg” attached to it. Normally, that leg would be in a horizontal position. When it gets stuck, I could control it over Wi-Fi to do a sweep. It would lift the back and move it slightly to the side at the same time.
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I like it! Only problem I would be worried about is the “wiper” getting stuck on ground and it wouldn’t be able to retract back to the normal position.
If it is strong enought to lift rear to air it cannot stuck. It will spin 180deg and at 90deg rear will be at maximum heigh. End can be rounded so it will be slip if rover is so stuck or too near of wall that it just cannot turn.