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by letharion 37 days ago
Building a GNSS/RTK-based lawnmower.

The existing ones were quite expensive, especially when I started out. A friend had the idea to get a cheap/non-functioning lawnmower second hand, and tear out the circuit board. We're in the process of coding up a new ROS2 based stack that will roam the lawn on GPS with RTK in the charging station. My friend does most of the electronics stuff, and I focus on the software.

I'm at the point where I will start testing a simple bounding box soon and just have it drive around until it "hits the edge" and then randomly pick a new direction.

It's fun so see the software I build "in real life" instead of as a web-site, as is the case for my my daily job.

1 comments

Would love to see your progress as I am very early on in the same project. I was thinking of using ArduPilot and some custom waypoint generators.
Feel free drop me an e-mail on [nick] @ [the big G].com and we can discuss. :) Haven't seen ArduPilot before. Since I'm using ROS already, on of my goals is to lean as much as I can on that and avoid custom work where I can. Nav2 appears to be the most common "go from point A to B" framework in ROS-space.