Finding Distance From Driver Station

[mwtidd]

Originally Posted by Vikesrock

Before you go very far with this try something:

Figure out how long it would take an electromagnetic wave to travel from one corner of the field to the other. I believe you will find that it is a tiny fraction of the total ping time you would observe.

http://www.tkn.tu-berlin.de/publicat..._16_paper3.pdf

Using this technique they were able to get accuracy within 4m.
Not great, but it would be something.
Also if you had multiple APs to reference you could probably get more accurate by looking at their overlaps. It would eliminate some outliers.
Also based on what area in you could look for points of reference, bumps field borders, tunnels that kinda stuff.

This is only a proof of concept, as Mark pointed out the ideal solution would be to use zigbee which is much more accurate. I would also like to see robots use zigbee for robot to robot comms.

Originally Posted by Mark McLeod

Are you looking for the latency of the robot's wireless bridge to FMS Access Point to derive the robot's distance from the AP?
Sounds like a step towards Zigbee triangulation...

Zigbee is definitely what I want, I am hoping that if this even sort of works, that it will strengthen the argument to allow us to use zigbee devices on the robots.

And yes I would like to use the latency to estimate the robots position. I think it could give me enough accuracy to estimate what zone it is in, which is all I would need for localization. Even as bad as a 4m radius would still help, ie knowing roughly what heading to point to robot to see a target.