brentonw2004
New Member
Hello again everyone! This may be a crazy idea, but I guess that is what eventually brings better technology. I want to build a robotic lawn mower. I plan to modify a normal gasoline mower and drive it with electric motors on the rear wheels. I know I could make it to where I could control it by remote control, or maybe even with wires in the ground to mark the bounderies and have it do its job autonomously. But this is not exactly the way I would like to control it, and I know that these ideas are not new either. What I would like to do is equip the mower with GPS. I would like to build the GPS module into a circuit that I could remove and attach to either a laptop/palm pilot and interface it by either USB/rs232 so that I could basically walk about the lawn and mark off my bounderies by uploading the GPS positions into the software I would run it off of, then I would reattach the GPS to the mower and upload the map data to the mower. My idea is to basically use a computer of some type that is attached to GPS and let the software generate a virtual map that the robotic mower could wander about inside its bounderies according to an algorith to keep it's path neat. I am fairly confident that I could get the software and the elctronics of this project to work. Does my idea sound plausable? Any suggestions. I would like to attempt this, but my main question is, what is the most accurate gps that I can get? I have read up on some of them, and 3meters is about the most accurate I could find. That could possibly work for large fields, but I would neat much more accurate for something that could work on small lawns. Is it possible to get a gps that would work within 1ft? Also, how often do most GPS systems refresh? I believe that my design would need a refresh rate of at least 2 times a second. Any help would be appreciated. I know that this idea is rather advanced, maybe even ahead of GPS technology, but it is only an idea. If GPS is impossible to use, how else could I get a computer generated map for the mower to rome in. Thanks for reading and I look forward to suggestions.
-Brent
-Brent