Neato XV-11 charging base identification

[DaveC]

The XV-11 charging base has a kind of "picket fence" bar code behind an IR-transparent window. It shows up on the LDS scan and that presumably is how the XV-11 does the "wiggle dance" to back into the charger when it docks. Has anybody here tried to do their own docking routine using that? Has anybody here put any time into analyzing the docking base signature in the LDS data? I've been thinking about how to do docking -- it seems like its a bit of a pattern recognition problem -- I'm not to up on pattern recognition, however...

Ideas welcome.

-dave

[Chunk]

The XV-11 charging base has a kind of "picket fence" bar code behind an IR-transparent window. It shows up on the LDS scan and that presumably is how the XV-11 does the "wiggle dance" to back into the charger when it docks. Has anybody here tried to do their own docking routine using that? Has anybody here put any time into analyzing the docking base signature in the LDS data? I've been thinking about how to do docking -- it seems like its a bit of a pattern recognition problem -- I'm not to up on pattern recognition, however...

I can see the pattern in the LDS data.. it is pretty obvious as wildly varying brightness values that match a pattern.. the bad part is that those values are very random depending on distance and angle and lighting and who knows what else.. One thing I know for sure is that the brightness data saturates completely if you are close to the dock and becomes unusable.

Distance data is fairly reliable but brightness data is just a disaster.. I honestly don't see how to use such poor data to find the dock.. I wouldn't be surprised if the shape of the dock is a factor in the final docking maneuver because shapes are so much easier for the XV-11 to see and consistent to the end

If I wanted to make an XV-11 dock I would build a dock with a unique shape that was easy to track.. maybe something just like the bar code only using varying distances.