Science & Technology

This is such a cool idea, a sort of all-terrain outdoor Roomba that NotCot calls "A supercute robot that eats up snow and poops ice blocks." Yuki-taro was developed in snowy Niigata and is guided by GPS and a pair of video cameras embedded in its eyes. "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." Sort of Hi-tech Ice Harvesting. Seven years work by Niigata Industrial Creation Organization (NICO), Research and Development, Inc. (RDI), Niigata Institute of Technology, Yamagata University and the Industrial Research Institute of Niigata Prefecture (IRI) have gone into this, developed as an "environmentally-friendly robot that can operate by itself and support the elderly," but we can see it chomping snow and pooping blocks everywhere. But can it cope with Oswego, New York? ::Pink Tentacles via ::NotCot