Hi,
I’m looking for a convenient solution for creating missions for my lawn mower. It’s a skid-steer, track based and quite heavy vehicle and the issue is that where it performs pivot turns or tight curves you won’t have to mow the lawn for a while anyway. Because it will somehow plow that area with its tracks like a small tank
So when controlling it manually, usually my pattern is to go back and forth (reversing at each end) and “changing lanes” with as little steering as possible, like so:
This is a mission I created manually in large parts using Excel and I’m looking for a way to automate this more. Ideally having to draw a polygon and with the possibility to add inner exclusion zones (mostly for trees, i.e. round).
I guess there is no ready solution for that, but maybe something to start with…? Thanks for any ideas!
They are ~90 degree corners in most places, though, and you cannot specify exclusion zones, though you can enable obstacle avoidance and put fences around fixed objects.
Yes thanks, I’ve been there, but that’s what results in quite f… let’s say messed up edges due to the ~90° turns, especially on humid soil (it’s hilly with lots of clay here).
So I literally need to reverse using DO_SET_REVERSE each time it hits the polygon or an obstacle, so to avoid as much steering or pivots as possible.
If there is nothing on this yet, I’ll try my hand at it these days…
Great content you created there, I have seen that already some time ago with interest. And I totally agree with the spiral path for your mower and surface type.
But spiral isn’t a good choice in my case because:
Perimeter around the house/garage already has many angles
Many obstacles like trees
Terrain is hilly - you don’t want the rover to go sideways
…and the tracks do really dig stuff up as soon as you start to turn >30°
This type of mower requires another pattern, at least for my use case.
Following this. We are using a similar mower design. Turning 90 or 180 takes a while and makes a mess. Backwards and fowards is way more time efficient.
I like your excel approach, i’ll do the same once we get a couple of other kinks out.
At least figure a generic way to build some back n forwards path, and coding skills aside - doing a Yuri and merge it into MP.
Yes, exactly. I’ve got some ideas in my head already for an algorithm to create such a pattern. I’ll try to put that into code when I find some time (will be C# probably, that’s my daily business anyway), and if it works then we could create a suggestion to adapt and merge it into MP.
