Development of the intake system for the SnowEater robot

• A research focused on finding a new way to remove the snow.
• A smooth snow intake motion under low-power and lightweight constraints is presented.
• The controller adjusts its parameters in response to the load changes on the task.
• To adapt to uneven snow terrains an attitude control mechanism was developed.

The development of the intake system for the SnowEater robot is presented in this paper. The SnowEater robot is a small, lightweight and low powered autonomous machine, designed to remove and compact snow from small areas (less than 30 m2). Its design includes four interacting systems to accomplish the task. These systems are the intake, crawler, compressing and navigation system. This paper focuses on the intake system and its cooperative control with the crawler system. The intake system has three screws to collect the snow. The used control encloses the screw alternating motion and the tracked robot motion; the stable autonomous operation under different snow conditions is designed considering the snow income and its processing speed. Furthermore, an altitude mechanism is presented to enhance the mobility in deep snow conditions.