Skip to main content

Self-driving snowplows are clearing runways at airport

Yeti Snow Technology - Autonomy for the toughest conditions

Following Sunday’s terrible, fatal incident in Tempe, Arizona on Sunday, March 18, the autonomous-vehicle industry is under more scrutiny than ever just now.

While at least two companies — Uber and Toyota — have suspended operations on public roads, all of the firms that are interested in the technology will continue with private testing as they seek to advance the safety and efficiency of their respective autonomous technologies.

Away from cars, several companies are also working on other kinds of vehicles that can operate without any human input.

Take Yeti Snow Technology. The company has been developing an autonomous snowplow and recently tested it for the first time at an airport in Norway.

We all know that heavy snowfall can cause chaos at airports, closing them for hours, and even days if conditions get really bad. Predicting snow clearances is a tricky affair and keeping the relevant personnel nearby around the clock throughout winter can prove costly for airport operators.

Yeti hopes its autonomous snowplow is the answer. The machine is 20 meters long and 5.5 meters wide and needs only an hour to clear an area of about 350,000 square meters. It was tested recently at Fagernes Airport in Leirin, about 90 miles northwest of the Norwegian capital of Oslo.

Similar to the Daimler snowplow that we saw tested on a snowless airfield last year, Yeti’s autonomous machines clear the snow in formation, working together for optimum efficiency.

As the technology is being used off-road and in a strictly controlled environment, the computer-driven vehicle doesn’t need to rely as much on cameras and sensors for safe movement. The routes that each one takes can be accurately programmed as they will be predictable, always involving the same path to and from its storage facility. A platoon of the slow-moving machines can also be monitored directly by a human supervisor as an extra safety measure, if necessary.

Hans Peter Havdal of Semcon, a Swedish technology firm backing the project, is certainly excited about the system’s potential. “An airport is like a miniature society,” he says on the company’s website. “If we can get self-driving vehicles to operate there, we can apply the technology to any field whatsoever.”

Should Yeti’s tests be deemed a success, the driverless snowplows could be deployed at nearly 50 airports across Norway, with the possibility of further expansion beyond that.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
From Paris to NYC, Mobileye will bring self-driving cars to metropolises
A self-driving vehicle from Mobileye's autonomous test fleet navigates the streets of Detroit. (Credit: Mobileye, an Intel Company)

A Tesla in Autopilot mode can ply the highways of Northern California without issue, but when it comes to congested cities packed with erratic vehicle traffic, bikes, and pedestrians, cameras don’t always cut it. Or they didn’t, anyway. After years of testing, Intel-owned Mobileye intends to embrace the madness of the metropolis by rolling out self-driving cars in cities across the world.

On Monday, the first day of CES 2021, the company announced that Tokyo, Shanghai, Paris, Detroit, and New York City will all see fleets of Mobileye-powered vehicles rolled out in early 2021, if all goes well (regulatory issues are still being ironed out in NYC).

Read more
Waymo ditches the term ‘self-driving’ in apparent dig at Tesla
waymo takes its self driving cars to florida for testing in heavy rain

Autonomous car company Waymo says it will stop using the term “self-driving” in a move that many will see as a swipe at Tesla.

Alphabet-owned Waymo said that starting this year it will refer to its driving technology as “fully autonomous.”

Read more
To reach level 4 autonomy, these self-driving cars head to winter boot camp
Sensible 4 winter driving

Is there a more magical seasonal sight than snowflakes falling on banks of snow under a white sky, the only bursts of color to break up the merry scene being a jolly holly bush or a Christmas robin hopping across the top of a frozen fence? Maybe not if you’re a human. If you’re a self-driving car, on the other hand, that scene is pretty darn terrifying.

Autonomous vehicles are increasingly great at parsing street scenes and safely navigating according to either camera images or bounced Lidar inputs. Unfortunately, snow is an issue for both cameras and laser scanners due to noise (read: falling snow) blocking the sensors, and white-out conditions preventing the camera from seeing surroundings properly.

Read more