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Originally Posted by jdiwnab
Many places that have a tile ceiling would also have a tile floor. And while you see more of the ceiling, the landmarks on the floor would be a lot if you get up close to them. As you say, the accuracy of the system drops as you raise the roof (bad joke, but I amuse myself), but the ground clearence would usually be about the same, very low compared to the ceiling. I just think you can get a better, more reliable, more flexable system with the floor. I would love to see it work no matter which way use choose. Now what would really be "out there" would be to navigate on the earth's magnetic fields..... Birds do it, so how hard can it be....  |
Ideally the floor would be much better. It is at a constant height, perfectly flat and can be shrouded from external illumination. My only problem with floors is that there is a lack of repeatable landmarks on most floor and you can't see a whole lot of them at once. The exception to this might be hardwood floors and those speckled tiled floors. Anything that has texture can be used for relative navigation (look at optical mice), but in order to have absolute navigation, you need some sort of distinguishable features that are unique to an area. They area of uniqueness doesn't have to bee to large becase you will only be pattern matching to previously stored images near the last known postion. You know that the robot can't have moved 500 feet in one second. I think it would really take some experimenting to see what the minimum amout of unique features is. Even concrete floors like those in home depot have things like cracks, scratches, and dirt.
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wow, apparently alot more distinguishable features than i thought in concrete.
[url]http://pictar.net/concrete.bmp[/url
This pic is of about a 6" section of the concrete in my garage. It was taken with a DVT legend 530 Smart Image sensor.
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I suppose the question is do i really need absolute navigation? In order to answer that i need to figure out what i need this navigation system if for in the first place. The truth is i really don't know. Its just an idea that popped into my head. In addition it would give me an excuse to build a SLAM robot that incorporates cool things like control loops, motion tracking/pattern reckognition etc. These are things that interest me. Perhaps the objective of the robot could just be to make a 2d map of its surroundings. This is probably something i will never build simply because i do not have time but it is fun to imagine anyway.