Ill link to the topic when Im not on my phone but this was discussed previously, its one which needs bringing back to life too.

Hi Rich,

i read through your "Jarvis" and "Melvin" projects for insight, inspiration and guidance, but was unable to see if you had achieved it?

did/have you?

Simple answer - nope.

It's been on the list for some time but I've not got around to doing it (mainly because Jarvis doesn't move and Melvin is incomplete still).

I believe this may be the topic I mentioned earlier. It should be quite a long one with a lot of ideas batted around. I don't think anyone actually achieved anything but that was probably because they didn't try or were waiting for something else.

Even if you managed to get a GPS lock indoors, GPS is only accurate within 10 ft or so... Not nearly accurate enough to accomplish what you want to do... The easiest way to do it is give him a ride on a Roomba or iRobot Create as they have recharge/base station navigation built right in...

Another way to do it is to build some sort of infrared beacon system to guide your bot back to home base (this is the system the roomba uses)...

When talking about auto charging what we are really talking about is being able to navigate to a certain spot. There are more tasks involved, but that is the main one.

Here are some tasks that likely need to be performed for auto charging:

1. monitor power levels
2. detect a low power level (have a set or learned threshold)
3. navigate to recharging spot
4. successfully arrive at charging spot
5. safely connect to charging spot
6. do some power switching so the robot can charge without frying itself (if you have a 12 volt battery, pushing 12 volts output and connect the recharging volts of 14-20 volts (estimated) without turning off power to your robot then you have just pushed up to around 32 volts through your robot (sad times)).
7. charge the battery
8. sense when battery is charged
9. do some power switching to turn off the battery charging and turn on the robot
10. navigate away from the charging station and carry on with robot duties

Most charging stations use some sort of beacon to call out to the robot to say "here I am". If you couple that with a sense of direction like a compass that would aid the robot. If the robot had a sense of where it has traveled and can understand what room it is in (assuming it lives in more than one room) and I believe a neat way to do this might be with a glyph and use the camera so every room would be marked for the robot to understand where it us.

You'd want to use a compass, glyphs and a beacon as well as a lot of scripting.

For example for my robot if it lived upstairs at my home, the office on the east side of my house would be where it would recharge. It could go down the hall and into the master bedroom. So I would need 3 glyphs for each room and a 4 perhaps over the charging station in my office. If the robot wondered down to the bedroom, ran low on power it would need to acknowledge it needs to go east and find the glyphs in reversing order. First find the hallway glyph, then the office glyph, then the beacon and finally perhaps the charging glyph and center the picture in the camera view to dock with the charging station.

see the link that Rich mentioned or search for Automatic Battery Charger Docking

There were a lot of ideas discussed that may help with coming up with a way to do this.

Great list Justin, something for us all to get our teeth into. I see its been about a year since this was last visited, I believe that if we break it in to chunks together we can achieve something. @DJsures do you have any thoughts on this topic, as it seems like a function that a lot of us would love to tackle?

DJ mentioned that they have been working on a navigation system. We don't know much more than that, when it'll come, what it is etc. yet though.