I received a 2D laser range finder from the good people at Hokuyo more than 1 year ago. My plan was to try to use it to improve ArduCopter's altitude hold or collision avoidance but other priorities have taken up my time and it has ended up sitting in it's box all that time occasionally making me feel guilty so I'm giving it away!
It's a fairly expensive sensor I believe (>$1200), beyond what most people are willing to spend for a diy project but universities seem to use them regularly. Some specifications which can also be found here:
sensing field of 240 degrees
range of 6cm ~ 10m with 1cm accuracy
completes a full scan in 0.1 seconds
Serial or USB interface
500mA power consumption
160g
Ideally I'd like it to go to someone who can do the following:
- build an arducopter library to communicate with the sensor.
- incorporate the sensor's output for altitude hold or object avoidance. This would likely involve:
- adding a new throttle or roll-pitch mode to the main code
- if used for object avoidance, adding a new PID controller to allow setting the response to objects sensed
- adding a new parameter to enable/disable the object avoidance
- perhaps most importantly you must have the time and desire to see the project through (something that I clearly failed at!).
By the way, this free sensor comes with free advice from me to help you overcome any code problems you face.
So if you're interested in this sensor please email or PM me and if you've got a better idea of how to use it than what I've written above that's also great!
I imagine a few people will want this sensor and I only have one so apologies in advance for those deserving people that I might not choose!
Comments
Good point about getting it working for arducopter. Well..if the winner makes a library then it'll be reasonably straight forward to use it on any of the ardu-vehicles.
I'll give a few more days for some more people to ping me then I'll announce the lucky recipient.
Well, this sensor has a normal Serial interface, so will be easy connect to the APM. You just have to try to connect these two pins to an Arduino and check what is the output.
wish I could do something with it I have the place for it in my plane but it wont do any good there
maybe you could use it with ir sensor heat seeking or ir to ir following for follow me copter
the easiest way at least to me will be integrating it with an existing rover project to max the sensor
abilities just my 2cents
Jesse,
Yes, I'm pretty sure it works fine outside. The range is 6cm (min) ~ 10 meters (max). So that's about 2 inches to 30 feet.
Definitely a great little range finder. We used one on a quad for a competition but it was interfaced with a FitPC running ROS. Wish I had the time!
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