Ideas

Beware of rust

fine and dandy. every 8 year old kid has thought of this, so it's not worth a patent, save your money. speaking of youtube http://youtube.com/watch?v=M7jjj-Ij-44

problems: electric power sources in cold weather
navigation, keeping on your property. avoiding vehicles, people, pets.

the biggest issue will be legal liability. your device jumps out in front of a car, causes an accident and your company is bankrupt.

I love robots! If this were constrained to only roam your own driveway via an infrared device, similar to how the iRobot vacuum works, this could find a niche.

One could imagine expanding this to throwing salt on roads. Of course that would be more complex, but in principle it could be done.

And a robotic zamboni, that re-ices ice rinks after a competition!

The possibilities are endless. Should probably have a good legal team tho, since not everyone loves robots like I do, lol! :-)

Thanks for wonderful feedback. Few Clarifications if it was not clear in the web site. I-Shovel, uses a metalic strip as it's boundary. This is sensed thru two metal detectors. Infrared may not be practical, as it can be obstructed by snow.

Seeing as how I hate shovelling this sounds like a great idea and I can see it being practical as well. Set up the boundaries to reduce the need for a sophisticated vision system. Even use something similar to one of those dog invisible fences. As for power I don't see why it couldn't just plug in and have a very long extension cord or some device like that. I would definitely love to have one of these.

aguynamedgeoff,
Thanks for the feed back. I though of the power cord, but safety is a concern. We can of course use low voltage (say 12v) but still there is the problem of tangling and tripping. I was thinking of self-retracting code but still may not be very practical.

Cool idea, however look at the vacuum and see how many have sold. Divide that by the percentage of people who have to deal with snow and your market will significantly shrink.

It is a really awesome idea which can be developed with some thoughful additions and carefull assessment of market, risk and Return on Investment.

Since you are saying that you already have built a prototype, I have a suggestion for you:

Snow shovelling service in a small area of your town or suburb can be advertised and run with a small group of students also recruited from your area. Or maybe a group of your friends who love outdoors.

Build maybe 3 or 4 of your prototypes and run this service for a couple of months during varying levels of snow fall to see how your product works.

Since you are going to use the experience for your own good too, you can calculate the service charge which would be very very enticing to prospective customers.

Giving it some time and thought will improve the product and also give you lots of data to backup your product viability and safety

All the best