Development of the intake system for the SnowEater robot

Abstract 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 m 2 ). 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.