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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Raking leaves, very basic yard upkeep and mowing, is worth around $10 / day to most people (if it's close to basic human performance at those tasks). One can debate the year it will arrive (less than 30 years, more than 10 years), the utility value of a robot that can do that well is extremely high though.

And bring on the snow shoveling bots. Nearly every 50+ year old in cold climates will want one. Will we have to outfit them in specialized winter gear?

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> mowing

Robots which do this are already cheap and widely available, I see them everywhere.

Snow blower robots seem to be a thing too, not sure how useful are they. Racking leaves is probably also solvable problem.

It just seems that it might be more effective/cheap/viable to have a bunch of way more simple specialized 'robots' than a very complex/expensive general purpose one.

Not particularly good though. I did a fair bit of looking at them and tried a few on loan a couple years ago. At the time at least, you have to set up an electronic fence to set boundaries, which is very annoying if you have scattered garden beds or other obstacles it cannot bump into.

Also like Roombas (the brand, not robot vacuums in general) they have poor sensors and no real coverages algorithms, they just semi randomly roam around.

Battery life is also terrible, outdoor charging stations are harder to maintain etc.

All I’m saying is, there is a long way to go before they become defacto better than a person with a mower, they are a fair bit of work and fuss right now to set up and keep running.

> they have poor sensors and no real coverages algorithms, they just semi randomly roam around

Husqvarna supports that, but yeah it might struggle on very complex areas (I've only really have any experience with it on fairly simple lawns). It's certainly not just randomly roaming around:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLdSLJu8acg&ab_channel=Husqv...

I'm not even sure what other brands exist. They seem to completely dominate the market where I am.

I'm pretty convinced we can do snow removal robots now for a few thousand dollars plus a few hundred a year of maintenance (snow and electronics don't mix well), but you are competing with a 25-year-old with a truck and a snowplow blade who comes by and clears it for $100/month.

You can already get one for around $7000 which seems a bit steep:

https://www.yarbo.com/shop

Lawnmower bots are relatively cheap, so the cost for snow ones will probably go down as well over time (then again the market for them is probably much smaller and yeah, snow removal is cheaper and easier for a human to do compared to lawn mowing)

With all due respect to that company, it also doesn't look like it can stand up to removing very thick snow or operating on a large surface area. My house (and a lot of others who would pay for this) regularly gets more than 12 inches of snow in one event every winter, so the robot would have to operate in the middle of a snowstorm to keep the driveway and sidewalk clear on the day that matters.

Snow removal is also lot more physically strenuous than most other yard tasks, meaning much bigger motors and batteries, almost approaching car-sized.

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