Dec 16 2019
Introducing Snowbo - the world's fully first autonomous snowblower with weatherproof docking station. Available for pre-order on Indiegogo now.
Roboworx has just announced the launch of their first robotic product, Snowbo. Snowbo is the first fully autonomous snow blower in the market, and is uniquely positioned to disrupt the home-robotics industry.
The idea for Snowbo originated when Youssri Helmy, Roboworx founder, was thinking of ways to build a robot to safely chase rabbits out of his backyard in the San Francisco Bay Area.
As Helmy, who had spent several years battling freezing temperatures in the Greater Boston area, began to develop a mechanical pest-control solution, he realized that the technologies used to chase rabbits out of backyards could also be applied to clearing snow from driveways in colder areas of the world. He began to research how he could leverage this technological commonality. "As I was trying to clear my backyard of pests, it occurred to me that even having moved to sunny California, this was as backbreaking and painstaking a chore as clearing my driveway of snow, which I'd had to do for all those years when I lived in Boston. I really felt like there just had to be a better way to do these things in the twenty first century." Helmy, whose entrepreneurial resume includes thirty years of startup and venture capital experience in the Middle East and the United States, immediately began to assemble the Snowbo team and seed funding necessary.
Snowbo is an AI-powered snow blower that does not require human interaction or control. The robot uses weather forecasts, which it downloads from the cloud, to determine when and how long it goes outside to work. Unlike its human counterparts, Snowbo does not experience fatigue or the shock of colder temperatures. It starts to clear driveways as soon as the snow begins to fall, and continues to keep these spaces clean during and after winter storms.
"Snowbo uses its patent-pending obstacle detection technology, SafeStop, to detect obstacles and navigate around them to safely clean the driveway," says Bachir Kharraja, P.H.D., Roboworx Chief Technology Officer. "It's not a clunky, blocky, robot from a bad 1980's movie. This is a fully electric and self-charging snow-blower that doesn't create CO2 emissions. It is a much more environmentally safe option for residents of snowy areas-not to mention an easy choice for drivers and people who would otherwise be stuck clearing their driveways."
Now, backed by several angel investors in the San Francisco Bay Area, Snowbo and its parent company Roboworx are ready to disrupt the homewares platform. "We started Roboworx to automate home chores by providing intuitive autonomous robots that act intelligently in a household environment," says Ed Metwally, Roboworx Chief Executive Officer. "Our robots provide convenience, peace of mind, and relieve our customers from having to do laborious, time-consuming, and often dangerous chores. It's a solution for the technology age."
According to Metwally, "We plan to continue developing Snowbo to help with other winter chores, like salt and sand spreading, as well as ice-scraping." Now, after three seasons of testing, Snowbo has launched an Indiegogo campaign "It's time for a better way to do your household chores," says Kharraja, "and Roboworx is going to be here to help."