Lahman: Tired of shoveling? Let's build some robots

I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at newly issued patents each week, focusing primarily on local companies and inventors.

But I'll confess one patent issued recently to a fellow in Florida caught my eye. It's for an autonomous device designed to detect snowfall and then clear it automatically. Essentially, a snow blower robot.

Technology is supposed to help make our lives easier, and automation is supposed to relieve humans of tasks that are monotonous or difficult. Shoveling out your driveway on a wintry day in Rochester certainly meets those qualifications.

The idea of robots as consumer devices isn't far-fetched. You can buy a robotic lawn mower from Home Depot, and several companies sell robot vacuum cleaners like the Roomba, which can clean your living room while you're away. Why not a robot to clear the snow from your driveway?

I first raised the question a few years ago when I was talking to some engineering students at the Rochester Institute of Technology. They had hands-on experience with robotics and said they'd tinkered with the idea, but that automating the snow removal process presented some unique challenges.

One of the issues is what to do with the snow. When a robot mows a lawn or vacuums a rug, it only needs to figure out how to criss-cross a closed course. But a snow robot, whether it's plowing or blowing, also has to figure out how to do it in such a way that leaves snow in the right places, not just random piles everywhere.

Maintaining traction is a non-trivial issue, and once you move outside of a defined space like your driveway, there's the issue that even humans have to tangle with: how to avoid damaging obstacles like mailboxes, porch steps, or cracks in the sidewalk.

Or cats.

There are other engineering challenges to overcome. But you don't have to look very hard to find examples online of people who've built working models of snow removal robots. A fellow named Aaron Makin in Indiana built a remote control snow blower last winter, posting a YouTube video and proclaiming that the biggest hazard was trying not to burn his tongue sipping hot chocolate while watching his driveway get cleared.

Last month from Japan came tantalizing images of a snowbot that looks like a Pokemon character. It scoops up snow from the front and ejects neatly compressed blocks of snow behind it.

A group of students in Wisconsin built their own remotely controlled snowblower, their entry in a robotics competition last year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And just last month, the Institute of Navigation held its fifth annual autonomous snowplow competition in St. Paul, Minnesota. A team from the University of Michigan claimed the top prize for their entry.

These are all great projects for engineering students or robotic hobbyists, but they're just prototypes, proofs-of-concept without an eye toward making a commercial product.

If you ask me, there's a great opportunity here. We've got no shortage of engineers here in Rochester, and we certainly have more than enough snow.

Autonomous robots are no longer simply a novelty. Companies like Boston Dynamics are developing four-legged robots for the military that can carry payloads across rough terrain, and Google is doing its best to bring driverless cars to our roads very soon.

So why not robots to clear snow from our driveways?

SLAHMAN@Gannett.com

Twitter.com/SeanLahman

Sean Lahman's column appears in print on Sundays.