Skip to main content

Shovel no more! The SnowBot Pro clears sidewalks and driveways for you

SnowBot Pro - The first commercial-class, self-driving robot that clears snow.
Your days of shoveling the snow may be behind you. Not because winter is going anywhere (we would hate to instill any false hope), but rather because technology may be able to do the job on your behalf. Meet the SnowBot Pro from Left Hand Robotics, a commercial-class, self-driving robot whose sole purpose is to clear the snow so that you don’t have to. After all, your time is too precious to be spent shoveling sidewalks and walkways.

This hefty robot was initially intended for use in residential areas, but the team soon realized that the machine would be better suited for commercial applications. “Snow and ice management companies, property managers, government agencies, etc. all face significant labor challenges when it comes to sidewalk and pathway work in the winter,” Mike Ott, chief technology officer of Left Hand Robotics told OEM Off-Highway last fall. “Securing the necessary labor force on short notice, in harsh conditions, for strenuous, dangerous snow removal work is very difficult.”

But not so with the introduction of the SnowBot Pro. The autonomous vehicle follows a programmed path that is determined by GPS and accelerometer and gyroscope technologies, and can be controlled from afar using an online dashboard. In order to actually remove snow, the SnowBot Pro uses a 4-foot-wide rotating brush, and is said to be able to reduce the number of people needed for shoveling by up to 80 percent.

This is due in part to the company’s claim that the SnowBot Pro is able to navigate and detect unexpected obstacles even without a human operator present. The bot leverages high-precision GPS RTK technology in order to make its way up, down, and around streets. According to Ott, human contractors will first “record” the sidewalks and paths the bot will ultimately take using a special tool (this doesn’t have to be done in the winter, making the process far less arduous). These paths are then uploaded to Left Hand Robotics’ cloud-based operations center, whereupon they’re turned into a series of commands that the machine uses to drive itself.

Once the snow falls, the gas-powered SnowBot needs only a human to open an app on his or her smartphone and press start. The robot will do the rest. SnowBot Pros are currently in production for the 2018-2019 season, and folks willing to pay a $1,000 deposit will be able to hold their spot in line to order one of these bots once they’re made widely available.

Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more