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Re: GPS antenna for an outdoor autonomous vehicle?
Well, RADAR is probably the best bet for this kind of use. That's what cars use, and they surely have some smart people designing them.
But perhaps having a person inside for safety isn't such a bad idea. 4000 pounds at 30 MPH is a lot of energy.
Collision avoidance could be done with a camera. In theory, the view ahead of a pace car should be fairly well characterized - basically nobody in front - and so if anything not normal is 'seen' >>go to safe mode.
Additionally, the car could navigate with a combination of inertial, odometry, magnetic compass, camera and GPS.
Inertial means accelerometers and rate gyroscopes. Odometery measures distance. You know what a compass does. The camera can spot visual cues placed around the track (think "vision target", like 3 orange dots( And GPS. Take all these together, correlate them with one another, and you can probably get it to follow a race line....
But this task is not trivial, and safety remains a concern. I would bet this is beyond the capabilities of a high school robotics team. A little help from college students would change that, but this is almost a DARPA-level thing.
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