Robot snowplow from Japan eats up snow, poops out bricks

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Expect a Pikachu conversion kit (and, dare I say it, a Hello Kitty version) to be sold right alongside Yuki-taro once he/she/it hits the stores (via Pink Tentacle).

I was prepared for Pikachu. Hello Kitty, I would’ve guessed.

The Pink Tentacle, however, caught me by surprise.

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What is it so afraid of?

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I live in Japan, and I’m always bummed that I don’t see things like this every day.

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Needs a companion robot to pick up the bricks.

Boston had the SNOWTRON in the 60s that could eat 150 tons of snow in an hour and didn’t need to leave snowshitbricks everywhere:

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That’s what she said.

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so wait, what do they use the bricks for? making snow forts, and having impromptu snowball battles? that’s the only reason i could see for having a snow brick-pooping robot.

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There are more than a few altered photos of Yuki-taro modified to look like Pokemon's Pikachu foating around online.

Pokemon? I’m having trouble seeing it.

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yellow brick road?

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For the love of all that’s holy don’t show this to Disney. The last thing we need is a Wall-e / Frozen mash franchise.

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From an article about the yuki taro: “… so where is it?? Yuki Taro seems to
have been retired immediately after the 2005 Aichi Expo and no
commercial manufacturer has taken up the task of moving from prototype
to production version.”

Man, one snowfall in Buffalo or in Montreal, you’d have to deploy ten thousand of these…and wait a week.

Snow? In Japan?

Seriously? Japan is pretty famous for its ski fields, and they did host the winter olympics in the not too distant past.

Hakuba Cortina, near Nagano had deeper, fluffier powder than I’ve ever come across anywhere else.

Its the brown bricks you have to stay clear of.

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Also, don’t eat the yellow ones.

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Mr Zappa I presume?

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…and then shred them into fresh snow, which it sprays in a lovely blanket over all.

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It’s too bad that(as far as I am aware, please alert me immediately if this is not the case!) the cold war didn’t produce any properly insane snow-clearing gear.

If you simply adopt an authentic period sense of risk tolerance and technological optimism, a big nuclear-thermal snow melter would be a relatively simple engineering problem, and undoubtedly impressively efficient in its duties compared to fossil fuel ones.

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I assume this isn’t “properly insane” enough for you then?

(that’s the engine from a MiG-17)

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In the US we just have what I call “melter trucks.” The truck gets snow up into a bed, or other trucks dump it in, and it just melts it, to flow away down existing water infrastructure. They’re not cute at all.