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SLAM is likely exactly what they were doing on Mars (it falls apart if there’s no image features to register against on the ground) and ToF lidar works great fo
by tonyarkles 2y ago
SLAM is likely exactly what they were doing on Mars (it falls apart if there’s no image features to register against on the ground) and ToF lidar works great for vertical position and velocity but doesn’t help much for horizontal position or velocity if there isn’t much terrain variability for the lidar to reflect off of nearby.
100% agree on the RF beacons. You might not even need the directional antennas. Using things like RSSI might be enough to augment the local sensors. Alternatively having a digitally-controlled phased array could probably result in quite excellent positioning.
- bri3d 2y ago> SLAM is likely exactly what they were doing on Mars I think the system on Ingenuity just used feature detection based 2D optical flow rather than a more full-scale 3D environment-reconstruction type SLAM setup. Which is fine since neither would work in a blank environment like that.
- tonyarkles 2y agoAh yeah that’s true. I’d forgotten about that step in the middle. I suppose too… very valuable lesson learned there for the team: you’ll need to come up with something to augment the optical nav system in that environment!