Hy friends.
I'm new into this forum and at first i'd like to thank you for your attention.
I built a RC slope mower for my large garden. It seems to work very well. A sabertooth 2x60 and two brushed motor 350 watt/each are used.
Next step would be to make it autonomous (i keep in mind ARDUROVER). Of course at the begin i'd try to use a GPS guidance only.
Unfortunately i have only a few electronic bases. For this reason i am here to ask for Your help courteously. Your suggests are very very appreciated.
Thanks in advance
Mauro Maffioli
Replies
There was an 'issue'/feature request logged against ArduPilot in the Google Code Project to add support for Differential GPS (DGPS). DGPS with two groundstations near your house would greatly improve the accuracy of the GPS to a point where it could be very usable as a lawn mower.
http://code.google.com/p/ardupilot/issues/detail?id=48
Wikipedia article on Differential GPS (DGPS) explains it well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_GPS
For some ideas, there is an annual robot lawnmower competition for American university students, the reports for last year's entrants are here http://robomow.ion.org/?p=140 some of those robots are very expensive, using laser scanner and differential gps. How much can you spend?
I think ardupilot can be used but the positional error can easily be a few meters, so your neighbour's flower garden might get "trimmed" by accident.
Current commercial robot lawnmowers use an rf signal from a wire embedded in the ground along the border of the mowing area, and randomly wander within the bounds. For example, robomow. Apparently the new one from bosch does a more efficient pattern https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JB_0DMp-ihg I don't know what sensors it has.
anyway, robot lawnmower is a great project and I'm sure many people are thinking about it.
Can you show a picture of your slope mower?