Hey all!
For localization of my robot(-car) I need to be able to localize infrared 940nm LEDs in an area of a size of a (average American medium size) living room. Each LED must be localized pretty well: lets say to be able to distinguish two LEDS 1/4 of an inch apart from a distance of 33ft.
Is such a thing possible with tight budget?
Thanks in advance!
Hello @4m17 and welcome to the RobotShop community,
To be able to differentiate between LEDs you would have to modulate with various frequencies, and although this is absolutely possible I’m not sure if you would be able to distinguish two LEDS 1/4 of an inch apart from a distance of 33ft.
Perhaps these papers can give you some ideas:
I hope that helps!
Thanks for the warm welcome and reply!
Actually, my journey begun in a similar article: Infrared Beacons for Robust Localization where they encoded different loop signals in infrared beacons and thus can identify each beacon and infer from that the position of the car. After I played a bit with some circuits I’ve managed to build such beacons. But then I’ve decided to move the focus of my project to the “brain” of the robot(-car) so I neglected this fancy way of localization into a more straight forward way, meaning, position a camera on the ceiling (for that matter), define the rectangle of interest with four infrared LEDs - one in each corner, and place one LED on top of my robot(-car) - and that’s it - I know where my robot is.
I want to use the infrared beacon out of an idea from the above article: using 940nm infrared make the computation to recognize this LED very easy and almost without any noise.
Problem is: in the article they have used a camera that costs $350 (which make sense because they had to recognize the beacons from 100m). If my partner will find out that I’ve spent such money on such a thing - it wouldn’t be good, so I’m looking for a camera that would fit better into my budget (and again - I need to recognize LEDs from 10m or so).
I hope this was better explanation of my motivation
Again, thank you very much for the help!
Interesting idea!
Unfortunately, I don’t have much experience with Infrared Beacons used for localization, however, your idea seems slightly similar to something I used for localization once, perhaps you can check it out and see if it could work for your project!
