Finding Distance From Driver Station

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by lineskier

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.

In that paper, they were directly manipulating the WLAN card to send and receive raw WLAN frames, not IP layer pings. In FRC you do not have such control over the access point or the WLAN radio on the robot, so the method they employed would not be possible. Also, even with their method (that you can't reproduce), they achieve 4m accuracy, which is 1/4 of the length of the field or 1/2 of the width, so even at that (unobtainable) accuracy it doesn't seem very useful.

Also keep in mind that this method only gives you a distance, but not a direction, so even if it worked you would only be able to locate your robot along a circle across the field that would be drawn by using that distance as the radius of the circle. And to further complicate things, the access point used at the field is not located in a pre-defined position, and will vary between events and possibly even during the day of an event if it gets moved a bit by field personnel.