Hacker News Reader

Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how localization is still among the biggest challenges, despite some great new technology like UWB (for instance, https://www.decawave.com/product/dwm1000-module/). Visual SLAM is obviously difficult in an environment where most of the visual mass (containers) moves.

View on HN

After some digging, it appears the particular tech they are using is Locata[1], which uses a time of flight based positioning system.

To deal with the terrible multipath problems in a site full of metal boxes, a phased array approach is used to so the receiver antenna is directional and electronically steerable. Locata have a clever way of doing this called vRay [2]. This uses time-slicing rather than many simultaneous receivers to cut costs, and you can see this ball of smaller antennas on top in several shots.

In contrast, the ultrawideband (UWB) tech you have linked uses the frequency specific nature of multipath to average out the error, but as UWB is over a range of frequencies used for other purposes, it is very limited in legal TX power, and so I suspect it would have range issues in this application.

[1] http://www.locata.com/technology/locata-tech-explained/locat... [2] http://www.locata.com/article/vray-antenna/

They are smart to use specialized sensors here (not sure which spectrum) to triangulate. You can get a consumer version of this in some floor cleaners now! [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/d/Robotic-Vacuums/Mint-Automatic-Floo...

From what I understand, in robotics SLAM is still one of those areas of development that still has a lot of room for innovation, if you have the chops for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com