They certainly do have a small team and definitely seem to be ramping up. They definitely aren’t sitting idle. I get the sense they are running as fast as they can to try and meet all their goals and keep their customer base happy. Looking at other robot mowers in the industry I am blown away with what Yarbo is able to accomplish and the capabilities as well as build quality. The other thing to consider is that every other robot mower on the market has one function to worry about. Yarbo has almost have a dozen and has to cover all seasons.
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They probably need to take some of the marketing team and move them to RND. Let them try a yarbo out see how well it does all the lies they market.
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Check out how well the zero turn works in the first minute here…
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It really just needs to keep moving forward in a continuous motion with smooth arcing turns or back out the way it came and clear a turning radius… Or ideally both, as needed.
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My assumption is that the folks in China don’t have the same widely varied winter conditions we do in the US. Not a good excuse, but I suspect that’s part of the problem.
I’m sure you’ve seen the videos of them testing Yarbo in the big refrigerated room filled with manufactured snow. Those tests are better than nothing, but I doubt they can accurately simulate a lot of real world conditions that way.
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I’ve got a long curving gravel driveway as well, and zero turns are no end of trouble. Any auto-routed plan is full of short segments and turns, which inevitably leads to getting stuck. If only the planner would create sweeping tracks that follow the driveway path - Yarbo can follow those so much more efficiently, and rarely gets stuck.
My best workaround has been to create sidewalk paths that start at the base station and run the length of the driveway. I have 4 loops starting from up and down the center of the driveway, then incrementally closer to the edges until it’s down the whole driveway.
Unfortunately, if I put a sequence of sidewalks in a plan together, it insists on backtracking each sidewalk path (all the way out and back again) before starting the next one, so it doubles the time and can’t finish on a single charge, unless I manually send it out on each sidewalk in turn. An option to not backtrack would be a really simple fix.
The hardware (mostly) works, and this could be sooo much better with a bit more software development. The ideas in this thread are all solid - they just need someone interested in executing on them.
An open API to let this community help make the system better would be amazing. Some of us have built a lot of robots over the years, and I expect would be willing to spend some evenings solving these problems for the benefit of everyone (including Yarbo’s management team).
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Wow. This look like it took a while to set up.
So each sidewalk is like a loop? Goes out, curves, and comes back as an adjacent pass?
Or is it each sidewalk starts at one side and ends at the other side?
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Good job saving it’s butt. That almost never works for me, I have to walk out and rescue it more times than not.
The last big storm we got I sent it out at 12:30am, I rescued it many times, and after an hour, I gave up and had to clear all the snow myself in the middle of the night.
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That’s pretty much my experience as well.
Yes, exactly. They all start and end on the right hand side, near the charging dock. Otherwise it would plow one length, then backtrack the whole way instead of plowing another strip on the return trip.
As an inconvenient side effect, it looks like the path planning algorithm assumes that sidewalks are straight lines (as discussed in another thread), so the length of the sidewalk loop is only the few feet of distance between the start and end points. So it often plans a “short” route from 10 feet away from the charging dock by taking one of the 500’ sidewalk loops to get there.
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You’ve really got me interested.
We’re not expected to get any snow for the next 10 days or so. So if I find the free time, I’ll try to replicate what you created (the long looped sidewalks) to see how they behave in my driveway. I’m quite curious.
Side Note: Offhand, I would have thought Yarbo might get stuck in un plowed snow at the end of the sidewalk where it tries to turn (loop) since Yarbo doesn’t make nice clean turns.
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What does the circular pattern give you? Have you tried to break the area up into a couple areas?(Although this shouldn’t be necessary and adds quite a bit of time with perimeter passes….
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3 more “issues” tonight, nearing ~40 issues🫠
The RC firmware still insists on bad zero turn logic…this really should get fixed next update…if the snow is deep do an austin powers 99 point turn if you must. Tracking and utilizing areas that are clear already may help but even just backing up more and doing the “turn in maneuver” a couple times would be way better. Have had at least 3 issues caused by this in the last 24 hours.
Edit: readding album link:
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Oh phew, was able to wiggle it out…
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This is what I’m talking about. At the end of the first pass it needs to back up a little and do 2 perpendicular passes at both ends so it can turn the snowbox. Then do 2 passes on the sides. Once both ends are cleared it can preform the zero turn around unimpeded. Until then the track slippage will occur forever. Swinging the snowbox across unplowed snow is an episode of unreliability. It’s no problem if your driveway has seen a plan or 2 but starting out with any level of accumulation. You will be Bay Watching-offering rescue support.
Should rescuing Yarbo be -Bay Watching, Pam Andersoning, or Hasselhoffing?
I’m here for it.
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+1 for all of the above. Especially any Baywatch rescues. 
It has been suggested in the PPP group that it have an option like the mower for number of perimeter passes 2,3,4 and also an option for a second perimeter pass cleanup at completion. I think if implemented this would help considerably. @Yarbo-Forum
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When I snow blow I don’t run a perimeter at the beginning, slope mode doesn’t, either, if they get the corner turning logic functional the perimeter pass might not be needed at all. Smart turn for the S1
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Agreed. Just trying to work within the current software constraints.
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