In this installment, I give a brief overview into the history and construction of my six wheel GPS guided rover project. This project started back in 2006, and its has seen many modifications and upgrades over the years. Now, it has become the platform to test and demonstrate the Ublox C94-M8P GPS RTK module and the Devantech CMPS14 Tilt Compensated Magnetic Compass, in combination with the SparkFun RedBoard Turbo SAMD21 Development board.
This combination enables me to run predetermined GPS routes around my farm without the need for an active cellular or Internet connection, or any other outside support other than the RTK corrections sent by my own GPS RTK Base Station.
Route planning is done manually by scouting the routes and recording the waypoint coordinates, with I can then build into Google Earth KML files for visualization and fine tuning. I have also found ways to visualize the general shape of the routes by building them into Excel Spreadsheet Documents and applying the appropriate graphing functions.
This project purposely uses no off the shelf navigation hardware or firmware, such as Orange Cube, Ardurover or Ardupilot. All navigation is by my own program, which is an iteration of the same code I first developed for the DARPA Grand Challenge back in the early 2000's.
This video is the first of what I hope to make into a short series which goes into more detail of how the system works from end to end.
My purpose for these videos is to inspire others to dig deeper into the code, the math, the geometry, trigonometry, and other disciplines necessary to translate simple GPS coordinate text strings into real-time decimeter-precision Cartesian navigation solutions using a bare minimum of computing resources and external support- or in other words, closer to true autonomy.