Yarbo robotic snow blower review: A yard crawler for all seasons
At a glance
Expert rating
Benefits
- Extremely maneuverable
- Great Features
- Cool modular concept
- Stable and easy to use application
Disadvantages
- The price tag
Our Verdict
The Yarbo Core is not a cheap device, but it is a very capable and powerful garden robot that you can use for several outdoor tasks. Its snow blower works great, and Yarbo’s hardware and software are very impressive.
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Yarbo’s modular garden robot was a hit at the CES show in Las Vegas in January 2025, but I have to say I was skeptical of the concept. Once I had the opportunity to test the new machine with its snow blower attachment, one of the many accessories that can be attached to this track-powered robot, I changed my mind.
The Yarbo kit arrived in three large boxes and installing the machine is a project. It is absolutely not difficult thanks to the clear instruction manual. You get all the tools you need and each one, including Allen keys, is labeled. Great!
Mikael Lindkvist
Features
- Manufacturer: Yarbo
- Equipment: Yarbo Core, snow blower module, battery, docking station, accessories)
- Weight: 134 pounds (61kg) (Yarbo Core, less snow blower)
- Battery: 36V, 38.4mAh
- Working temperature range: -11.2 degrees Fahrenheit to 113 F (-24 to 45 C)
- Bad weather: IPX4 (i.e. not tested for dust penetration, protected from water spray in any direction)
- Towing capacity:
Control it with a smartphone or Yarbo’s portable remote control
After a few hours, the RTK antenna is in place on the front of the house, the base station is nailed down and the machine is ready to start testing. On my first trip to Västerbotten, a province in northeastern Sweden, I didn’t have time to do anything other than assemble the kit and manually drive the snow blower. You can choose to control it with your mobile phone or with an included handheld remote control that looks like it belongs on a game console. The idea of course is that you plan the snow removal to save time, in addition to saving your back.
Mikael Lindkvist
Controlling it through your mobile phone is really simple, as Yarbo’s app is exemplary. But there are a lot of things to keep track of besides navigating the machine. You can adjust the power level of the snow blower motor itself in several stages as well as the depth at which it should dig and the angle at which it should eject the removed snow. It’s not so good if you throw ice and maybe gravel on your car or in front of your house. The snow blower is powerful, on par with the best battery-powered snow blowers I’ve tried, so it has no problem throwing snow (and chunks of ice) 25 to 25 feet (7.6 to 8.7 meters).
Mikael Lindkvist
I had more time to really test what the Yarbo was capable of on my second trip. It would of course have been best to install the machine at the start of winter, not when half a meter of snow had thawed and then frozen again. In terms of snow on the ground, the conditions were simply not optimal.
Studded trails are a must in winter
The first thing I did, and which I failed to do in the first part of the test, was to go on studded tracks. Without them, the Yarbo Core simply slides on icy surfaces. This is a fairly simple project though and the robot does much better with them. It was amazing to see how he maneuvered the icy edges.
Mikael Lindkvist
The Yarbo Core charges either while standing on its charging base or via an included mains charger. The included 36V battery fully charges in about 3 hours, but when it’s cold outside it needs to warm up for 20-30 minutes before it can start charging its battery. A full charge lasts up to 4 hours depending on specifications. The robot cleared large areas in that time, so snow blower run time shouldn’t be an issue unless you have large areas to deal with.
On paper, Yarbo should be able to handle up to 125,000 square meters (149,499 square yards); but of course it depends on the job. The area I was working on was only 700 to 800 square meters (837 to 957 square yards) in the form of a large driveway and a section of road. During both testing periods, the robot had no navigation issues, only needing a little help once to access its charging dock.
Mikael Lindkvist
It’s very easy to plan your automated snow removal using the Yarbo app. If you have already installed a peripheral wireless robot lawn mower, you are familiar with the concept. You drive the machine around the edges of the area you are mapping, during which you can mark no-go areas. It is also important to indicate in which direction the snow should be pushed. This is easiest to do after you’ve created your initial map. You can then schedule when you want the snow blower to run. You can also customize it to only clear snow after snow events.
Mikael Lindkvist
There are other smart features too, including Smart Vision, which lets you look through the robot’s onboard cameras while it works. Another important feature is that the machine recognizes obstacles, including people. As soon as I walked near the snow blower, it would say “human detected” and pause until I was a safe distance – about 4 to 5 meters (13 to 16 feet) – from the robot.
This robot can also pull a trailer
It is of course difficult to judge the reliability of a machine like this in a few days of testing, but my first impression is that this is a truly high quality machine with stable software. You probably wouldn’t buy a Yarbo Core just for its winter utility (Yarbo offers a scraper bar ($59) and snow plow blade ($159) as options. Once you have the Core, you can choose between two sizes of lawn mower modules and a trimmer module for cutting grass in the spring and summer, and there’s a leaf blower module for clean the leaves in the fall.
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I imagine this robot will do a great job mowing lawns, at least it won’t have any problems moving around. You can also tow up to 500 pounds with its trailer hitch installed, and opting for Yarbo’s $149 rear brace rack increases that capacity to 3,500 pounds (with a 200-pound tongue weight). Finally, if you live on a large plot of land, you can program it to patrol as a robotic security guard.
The Yarbo Core and its snow blower attachment are extremely expensive, but it’s definitely one of the coolest products I’ve tried.
This article was originally published on our sister publication M3 and has been translated and localized from Swedish.
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