Cute Japanese Snowplow Robot

We’ve seen the Japanese Robotic Dead Body Remover before, here’s something more "mundane": Yuki-taro, an autonomous snowplow robot. It "eats" snow, and craps out "hard blocks" as it goes along!

The friendly-looking Yuki-taro measures 160 x 95 x 75 cm (63 x 37 x 30 in.) and weighs 400 kg (880 lbs). Armed with GPS and a pair of video cameras embedded in its eyes, the self-guided robot seeks out snow and gobbles it up into its large mouth. Yuki-taro’s insides consist of a system that compresses the snow into hard blocks measuring 60 x 30 x 15 cm (24 x 12 x 6 in.), which Yuki-taro expels from its rear end. The blocks can then be stacked and stored until summer, when they can be used as an alternative source of refrigeration or cooling.

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