This is some what appropriate for today (knee deep in snow here), the robotic snow plough AKA Yuki-taro.

Yuki-taro may look like one of Bob the Builder’s friends but he’s (or should that be it) one high tech piece of machinery. By using a GPS system and video camera eyes Yuki-taro is able to find snow, suck it up and compress it into blocks for easy storage, these are then expelled out of the back, so he craps blocks of snow so to speak.

Yuki-taro is a working concept at the moment and won an award in the recent Good Design Contest . The robotic snow plough is planned for commercial release in the next five years.

Source: Pink Tentacle