"Three... Two... One... Let's plow!"

At the Seventh Annual Autonomous Snowplow Competition in St. Paul, Minnesota last month, the Institute of Navigation pitted  the best of mechanized snow-scooping world against one another for an icy challenge: Clear a path, completely autonomously.

With the help of radio beacons, lasers, and an occasional decorative deer skull, the robots navigated themselves without any human intervention. It's like Battle Bots, but with more parkas and no remote controls. And all for an ostensibly useful purpose: reducing the human labor needed to clear snow, which can actually be a matter of life or death.

Read Full Story