Yarbo’s ‘Amazing’ Route Planning… So Efficient It Hurts!

Support & Solutions
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Yarbo snow blower issues with route calculation and blowing control.

Routing problems:
The automatic route planning is really inefficient. It creates messy, unnecessary patterns instead of a clean, optimized path. In situations like mine, there needs to be an option to manually set the exact route so the machine follows it without changing anything.

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Blowing direction issues:

  1. When I set the blowing direction, it should always follow those settings. Instead, the algorithm blows snow back into the areas it already cleaned, which defeats the whole purpose.
  2. It shouldn’t blow snow where it’s not supposed to. Even after setting the configuration, it acts on its own and throws snow into restricted areas. When it turns, the chute rotates too early and ends up blowing toward the main road where cars are driving. It should completely stop the blower first, then rotate the chute - never while blowing and adjusting .
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Try the circle pattern or possibly the slope pattern to try and straighten those lines out. Keeping the snow throw directions to one side also really helps keep the path lines more consistent. Hard to tell if the rest of your plan has it on the one side or not. During the perimeter run, Yarbo has stated that it will throw into the area. I agree, it should respect the snow throw direction at all times.

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Hi there, first of all thank you for your feedback.

Regarding the routing issue, could you please let us know which route pattern you were using when this happened? This will help us better understand where we can optimize. You can also try switching to other route patterns to see if they provide a better result in your situation.

About your suggestion for strictly following a manually-defined route, I will share this with our product team for evaluation, especially if more users express the same interest.

As for the snow-blowing direction and chute behavior, we’ve already passed your feedback to the product team for further improvement.

Thanks for your patience and for taking the time to share your thoughts!

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This would be extremely useful. Along with that add the ability to control the chute direction and angle in real-time as it is moving along.

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GREAT SUGGESTION. I would add set the return path also. I have one section of my driveway that looks similar to what this guy is showing. It is 1500 feet long. Even at Quiet setting it sucks the battery up fast (I maybe get down and halfway back on a charge), but then again, I am also having battery issues so who knows.

Anyways…

It would also be nice to set the return path. Situation - on a long run when it needs to go back and charge but the area no not close to being cleared. It hits the typical 20% but the dock is nearly 1800 feet away. Part of that has been plowed (area closest the dock), but the longest part is yet to be completed / its partial right now and needs more power to complete. The unit turns back to the dock running the blower and drawing the battery, but it has a lot of snow to push through because it is not returning on the area it has already done. Battery draws lower. We hit 15% and auger turns off. Now it is still in 6 inches of snow let’s say because it took the unblown path. Stuck. Now you get to manually drive it back in the path that is blown off.

My hack is to increase the charge reset from 20% to 30% (the max it appears). I must not be the first person to have ran into this issue?

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6 inches of snow will consume more battery. The general recommended run is send it out every 1-2 inches. Might help with your battery run times. I realize that may not always be practical, but just a suggestion.

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I sent it out at 1 inch. When it has battery issues and well you name it so the snow builds up…I guess the solution is Spring.

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I have curved road in my area too. I splitted it up to the smaller segments (areas): 12m segments for 4m wide road. Yarbo processes area more like rectangles instead of trapezoid.
I noticed that route is also calculated (Preview button) based on snow throwing direction. In some areas I was able to adjust route to expected by adjusting snow throwing direction and length (yellow line), Preview button in the same setting shows the route.

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Yeah that makes sense. Forgot you were having battery issues. Easy to fall behind that way. And I agree with your suggestion of following already cleared paths back to the charger. Makes a lot of sense.

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Yeah @mike1 that’s a good one. If I was doing it manually and broke a shear pin, I’d take it back to the garage via the already cleared area.

And Yarbo has clearly marked the lines that it has cleared so it knows what’s been cleared.

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Yep. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense for Yarbo to deliberately head back to the charger using a path that has already been cleared. Kinda obvious. lol

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@bryan.wheeler - yes, I have already set the throw direction to one side, this was working well last year. Whatever new changed made in the new algorithm is causing these messy lines now. Even during the perimeter run, it should still respect the set direction - hopefully they fix this behavior soon.

also tried the circle pattern, but that didn’t work well either. adjusted many patterns, but nothing has been effective so far it still blows snow onto the main road, which is a major concern, in addition to the inefficient route planning.

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I’m using the slope pattern, but it ends up pushing snow back into areas that are already clear. It’s a bit frustrating, constantly I am trying to adjust what could work.

And you might be wondering why there are so many no-go zones. I can’t fully trust it, since it sometimes goes outside the boundaries and gets stuck in a 2-inch depth from the edge of the driveway, requiring manual effort to get it back on to the driveway and sometimes it even goes into no-go zones. I have opened a ticket about this and shared the picture and logs, and support is still reviewing it.

The slope pattern is a good idea, but it shouldn’t cover the entire map. There should be areas I can edit and change the throw direction. It would also help to have a “Copy Area map” feature, so I can re use and set a progress ratio, start from that point with a different pattern, and adjust the direction as needed.

Ideally, all mapping edits should allow configuring the pattern, setting the throw direction, and viewing real-time directly on the map. For example, I should be able to draw a line in an area, assign a slope pattern, then draw another line in the area next portion of the map, set its slope pattern and direction, and see everything update in real-time without constantly switching back to the preview screen.

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Let’s hope they fix the glitches soon! Some good suggestions there.

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This snow monster has been feasting :drooling_face: on my fiber snow stakes like a kid in a candy store, six gone already since last year! Even I have set safety buffer 10 inch. Still going outside of the boundary to have some feast LOL!!!

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Yikes! You have poor GPS or GPS quality in those areas?

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@mike1 I escalated this too, my battery drains faster now. Last year, it would finish the first run and still have some battery left. this year, it only gets halfway through with just 20% remaining to recharge.

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Whenever I have checked it’s always more than 20.

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That’s your DC CNR values and they look good. Keep an eye on your rovers L2. Ideally you want more than 10 there and a quality value greater than 0.5 and an HDOP below 2. Anything else and it’s going to switch to dead reckoning and that can have drift over time and distance traveled. Might be what you are seeing. It sounds like you are working with support on the issues, so that’s good. Hopefully they find out what the cause is.

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Whenever it goes outside the boundary I try to perform “correct map drift”

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You shouldn’t have to do that unless your DC has moved or your rover shows an inaccurate location on the map when it has good (green) GPS. Those numbers all look really good.

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