Why Shovel Snow When Your Robot Can Do It For You!

With the latest dusting of snow and ice in Portland came a new opportunity to test the capabilities and functionality of my robotics project.

I had already created a plow blade for pushing materials around so I figured if it worked for leaves before, it should work for snow and ice as well. Turns out it worked very well indeed! I was able to clear the sidewalks in front of my house with just a few passes and also was able to clear some of the street. It worked so well in fact that I decided to move forward with building a proper plow blade that will have the ability to raise and lower to follow terrain or to allow the robot to move without dragging the plow around.