The Average Joe’s programmers are looking at summer projects; LIDAR has their interest. One of the students stumbled on the RPLidar A1M8 - 360 Degree Laser Scanner Development Kit on the Roboshop web site.
The Roboshop web site had this review, though:
The RPLidar A1M8 - 360 Degree Laser Scanner Development Kit had become a great accessory for programming a robot to determine the location in which our 2018 FRC robot needs to scale. Be it through auton and teleop portions of a match. Along with the functionality of the linear lidar, it provided a more advanced application of providing the option to become perpendicular to the surface as well as allowing us to drive straight.
Any idea who this was?
I’m still sorting through CD posts on rotational LIDAR… cutting edge, it appears…
254 used an RPLidar A2 on their bot earlier this year to detect scale state but removed it in favor of (what I understand) to be a camera at their driver station facing the scale. They said the data showed some promised at localization but that isn’t how they used it. I don’t think that review sounds like them though.
It’s possible the review was posted by 4678, I recall them mentioning purchasing theirs off of roboshop.ca. They mentioned using it to find cubes, and wanted to use it for position on the field, but I don’t believe they had that fully functional.
4678 used the A2M8 (A1M8’s bigger brother) to track cubes in auto. I’d like to know how the A1 stacks up considering the $130 price. It’s cheap enough not only to make a splash in FRC but the wider robotics education market as well.
Slamtec the manufacturer lists the weight for the A1 at 170 grams. The A2 is the one we are going to try and test with this summer weighs in at 190 grams.