Even a bot that just traces the track shape and size and beeps every 5 metres would be cool. Walk behind dropping a cone at each beep location.
oh man. now i want a quad-copter cone dropinā bot.
keep injecting your pragmatism. itās good. (tho itāll never get my my quad copter bot)
Iām not convinced that weād need RTK. The huge advantage we have is that we control the entire space. We can put up base stations anywhere we want and then just use triangulation.
I think you could do it with sweeping lasers and PPS. Iām not really good at maths, but if you have 4 lasers, one at each corner, that spun at some known RPM not only could the base stations figure out their location automatically but then any robot operating within the stationās box could also know its location.
somewhere between the PPS signal and the time and angle of detecting the lasers (maybe each one operates at a different wavelength or maybe they alternate sweeps) and some sort of RF component (ESPNOW) so they can talk to each other.
So the robot knows where the center of the box is, it can then automatically build the track by fitting it within the bounds of the box. Or a human could do that step and then just push the go button.
We just need a clever way to determine the angle of the laser strike. Or maybe not. If the base station transmitted itās angle at T=0 and the spin RPM was known then you should be able to determine the angle between you and that station. If you can do that for 4 stations thatās math even I could do.
Frickinā lasers, ESP32ās and GPS modules with PPS are cheap.
The best way to collect the cones would be to build cone scoopers that you mount to the front of your esk8 and turn the team loose at the end of the event.
What about augmented reality? AR over a live camera feed should mean that even if it has unexpected deviations it could accurately place the cones.
Thats what I was thinking, having the app first to āhuman botā might be a great start Actually if the app uses external GPS like Racechrono it might be pretty accurate.
The app just needs to show you if you are close enough to the zone where to place the cone. For example with starting/selected point of the track layout being at your current location.
I think it is 5x less convenient than charging and setting up a cone bot but 50x easier to implement.
It looks like this.
What Tuckjohn said about parking spaces is genius since you canāt really compare where you are to the lines enough but you can compare the lines to the terrain.
edit: oops forgot the picture
Also forgot to mention VESC has UAVCAN baked in, you can control VESC controller(s) via Ardupilot.
Maybe itās been mentioned but what about a bot that could drag a chunk of chalk? Then humans thrown down the cones on the line.