Robotics
Low cost lidar for student built autonomous rovers
Commercial lidar units cost more than an entire student rover, which keeps autonomous navigation out of reach for most teams here.
Almost every rover project we see stops at the same wall. The chassis, motors and controller are affordable. The moment the team wants real obstacle avoidance, the cheapest usable lidar costs more than everything else combined.
Our question is whether a single point time of flight sensor on a small rotating mount can approximate a 2D scan well enough for indoor and low speed outdoor navigation. The parts are cheap and widely available. The unknowns are scan rate, how badly the rotation introduces error, and whether the resulting point cloud is stable enough for a standard mapping stack.
If you have built something like this, or know why it fails, we would like to hear it. If you have tried and it worked, tell us what scan rate you reached and what you gave up to get there.
Our question is whether a single point time of flight sensor on a small rotating mount can approximate a 2D scan well enough for indoor and low speed outdoor navigation. The parts are cheap and widely available. The unknowns are scan rate, how badly the rotation introduces error, and whether the resulting point cloud is stable enough for a standard mapping stack.
If you have built something like this, or know why it fails, we would like to hear it. If you have tried and it worked, tell us what scan rate you reached and what you gave up to get there.
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