Ladies and gentleman,
It is with great pleasure that I get to announce another cool product available to FRC Teams this year from a company called Slamtec based in Shanghai China.
The RPLIDAR A2 Scanning LIDAR sensor:
http://www.slamtec.com/en
The cost was just outside of the price range for FRC Teams ($450) but Slamtec has generously agreed to lower the price to within the price range for ALL FRC teams globally (I'm not advertising the lower price here but it's under the limit for FRC parts). To obtain the discount, send an email to
sales@slamtec.com. They will work with you on how you can obtain the product.
But wait! There's more! Not only is the RPLIDAR A2 now within the price range for FRC teams, so is their SLAMWARE SDPmini system for automatic localization and mapping. They have agreed to reduce the cost of it so it is also available to FRC team's everywhere. Again, contact
sales@slamtec.com if you are interested.
Also, I don't know the FRC teams in China but I'm willing to bet someone on here does and based on my conversations with Slamtec's sales people, we need to make the connection happen because the Slamtec folks are a prime company to get onboard with FRC in China. They are enthusiastic and thrilled to be helping out FRC teams around the globe with their products and I know they would support their local teams too!
Also worth saying a mighty big THANK YOU to all the folks at FIRST who saw the light and made scanning LIDAR systems legal this year with the amendment to R32. These systems had not been legal in the past as Team 900 has been asking about them for years (
Q71 from 2015).