Snow Removal Robot: From Sicard's Blower to ABB

A snow removal robot promises to take over one of winter's worst chores, getting up before dawn to clear the driveway. You can buy one now, and some airports already test driverless ploughs on their runways. This post follows snow clearing from shovels and horse carts to Arthur Sicard's snow blower and on to the first robots. It looks at what Yarbo showed at IFA in September 2026, how Cologne Bonn Airport is bringing planning software into its winter work, and what ABB's sealed industrial robots can teach outdoor machines. It ends with the problems still open: price, safety and cold.

A Yarbo robot with its snow blower module clears a yard while the owner watches from the terrace. Photo: Yarbo

From shovels and horse carts to Sicard's snow blower

For most of history, snow was moved by hand. City workers shoveled it into horse-drawn carts and hauled it away, and households cleared their own paths and doorsteps. Horse-drawn plows opened roads but left high banks on either side. Railways needed a machine sooner than most, because a single deep drift could stop a train. In 1870 Robert Carr Harris of Maple Green, New Brunswick, patented a "Railway Screw Snow Excavator", an early attempt to cut through drifts mechanically instead of sending out a gang of men with shovels.

A man shovels snow into a horse cart on Blasieholmen quay in Stockholm, 1915. Photo: Swedish National Heritage Board via Wikimedia Commons (no known copyright restrictions)

The snow blower as we know it comes from Quebec. Arthur Sicard, born in 1876 in Saint-Léonard, watched the rotating blades of a neighbour's harvester and saw that the same idea could throw snow. He finished his first prototype in 1925, based on a concept he had described back in 1894. By 1927 his machines were clearing the roads of Outremont, a town that is now part of Montreal, and he went on to found Sicard Industries in Sainte-Thérèse. Smaller walk-behind blowers for homes came later. They still use a spinning auger to feed snow into a chute, and someone still has to walk behind them.

A Sicard snow blower in Montreal, where Arthur Sicard demonstrated his machine to city officials in January 1928. Photo: Archives de la Ville de Montréal via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The first attempts to take that person away came from Japan and Norway. In 2007 a group of organisations in Niigata, one of Japan's snowiest regions, showed Yuki-taro, a small robot that found its way with GPS and two cameras, swallowed snow and pressed it into blocks. A bigger test followed at Fagernes Airport in Norway in March 2018. Semcon and the plough maker Øveraasen, through their joint company Yeti Snow Technology, ran two autonomous ploughs there for the airport operator Avinor. Each was about 20 metres long and 5.5 metres wide, and the pair followed digital clearing patterns together, much like the convoys human drivers run on runways.

An Øveraasen plough and sweeper at Riga airport in 2024. The Norwegian maker worked with Semcon on the autonomous ploughs tested at Fagernes in 2018. Photo: Buttonfreak / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Yarbo, runway convoys and ABB's sealed robots

At IFA in Berlin, held from 4 to 8 September 2026, Yarbo showed the final version of its M Series, a smaller tracked yard robot for lots of about a quarter acre to 1.5 acres. One core drives around and the owner swaps the module on the front: a mower, a collector or a snow blower, with a trimmer still to come. Instead of boundary wires, it finds its way with Yarbo's NetRTK satellite correction and an optional lidar. Yarbo already sells a larger machine, the Y40 with its snow blower module. The company says it clears up to 12 inches of snow in a 24-inch path, works down to minus 13°F and starts on its own once snow begins to fall.

A Yarbo tracked robot throwing snow with its snow blower module. Photo: Yarbo

Airports got there earlier, because a closed runway costs far more than a snowy driveway. Clearing a runway the usual way can take up to eight vehicles in formation, each with its own driver. Yeti Snow Technology became Yeti Move in 2020 and now counts Husqvarna among its owners. Its driverless ploughs have since cleared snow in formation at Stockholm Arlanda. On 24 September 2026 Cologne Bonn Airport announced a pilot with Yeti Move for the coming winter. Yeti Hub will be used to plan and simulate clearing routes, and Yeti Driver Assist will guide the drivers in real time with live positions. In this pilot the drivers stay in their cabs.

Snow ploughs clear a runway in formation during a snowstorm, January 2014. Photo: John Murphy / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

ABB does not sell a snow robot, and its standard arms are not made for a blizzard. The product specification for the IRB 6700 gives an operating range of +5 to +50°C and recommends a warm-up run below 10°C, since cold grease and oil make the joints sluggish. Where ABB has real experience is in keeping water and dirt out. Its Foundry Plus 2 option seals a whole robot, from base to wrist, to IP67. It adds corrosion-resistant epoxy paint and protected cabling, so the arm can be washed with high-pressure steam. It is offered on models such as the IRB 1300, IRB 2600, IRB 4600 and IRB 7600. A snow robot spends its winter in meltwater, grit and road salt, which attack a machine in much the same way.

An ABB IRB 1300 with Foundry Plus 2 protection, built to handle water and dust. Photo: ABB

What a snow removal robot still has to solve

For homes, the next few winters will probably bring more modular yard robots, with one battery-powered base that mows in summer and clears snow in winter so the price is spread over the whole year. Yarbo's M Series is built on that idea and is designed for ordinary residential yards rather than large estates. Our post on garden and lawn robots covers the summer half of the job. The harder problems are the things a person deals with without thinking: a newspaper buried in a drift, a child's sled, a car parked across the path, ice under fresh snow. Satellite positioning tells the robot where it is, but it needs cameras or lidar to see what is in its way.

A Yarbo robot working its way along a paved path, leaving a cleared strip behind it. Photo: Yarbo

Airports and factories will take a different route. Big ploughs and sweepers will keep their drivers for some time, while software like Yeti Move's plans the routes and may later take over whole convoys where the rules allow it. Mobile robots will also need better navigation outdoors. ABB's Flexley Mover P604 uses Visual SLAM, building its map from camera images, which suits a factory floor. A yard under fresh snow looks different every morning, so outdoor machines rely more on satellite positioning. Industrial arms could also help build the equipment by welding blades and auger housings, though that is a possibility and not a known ABB project. Cells like that are usually planned and tested first in RobotStudio.

The ABB Flexley Mover P604, which navigates with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

Price is the first obstacle. On 2 October 2026 Yarbo's own store listed the Y40 snow blower bundle at $5,699 on sale, far more than a good walk-behind blower costs. Safety is harder to put a number on. A spinning auger near children, pets and parked cars has to stop reliably, and ABB builds that kind of force and speed limit into cobots such as GoFa. Cold matters too, because it is hard on batteries, grease and sensors, which is why ABB asks for warm-up runs on its own arms. Until those costs come down and the sealing lessons from foundry robots reach yard machines, a snow robot will stay a rare sight next to the shovel in most garages.

An ABB robot working between the halves of a die casting machine, the kind of wet, dirty place Foundry Plus protection is made for. Photo: ABB

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