One of my friends working on a GPS project of his own managed to aquire some Sarantel Helical antennas, and got some for me as well. I’m planning on using them with the U-blox GPS module I have had sitting around. (I originally bought the GPS module for a MUAV autopilot I’ve been slowly designing, but when I got busy with work it got put aside and technology outpaced my design. For the MUAV autopilot I’m now intending on using a smaller, lighter GPS module which has freed up this one for service on my Quadruped). I’m still mulling around on choosing an LNA to throw in between the radio and antenna to improve sensitivity, so the PCB design is stalled until I make a selection.

Although the GPS is “technically” able to attain a GPS lock indoors according to the literature, I’m not going to count on that. The camera will be used for indoor navigation and world modeling (I’ll post more on the progress of that later), while the GPS will be used primarily for outdoors navigation. The main reason for this is I’m thinking of having a go at the Robo Magellan competition put on by the Seattle Robotics Society. Although for the general flat environment a small walker is at a huge speed disadvantage to the larger wheeled or tracked rovers that typically enter, I’m more interested in the technical challenge of designing a robust and adaptive walking/navigation algorithm for the robot than winning.

As a bit of an unrelated note, here’s a picture of the populated circuit board for my mini sumo. Now that there’s no pressing deadline to get the robot working, I’ll have more time to fiddle with this board and get FreeRTOS up and running on the LPC2138 to manage the data and computational requirements of some of the more complicated sensors I’m throwing into this sumo robot for no other reason than “because I thought it would be a good technical challenge”