Our charging station is positioned under a roofed area (on the very edge). The GPS signal there is not perfect, but Yarbo manages to park itself successfully every time without a hassle. However, leaving the charging station by simply starting a plan fails in 80% of the times. In that case one must manually move the Yarbo for about 1m in a straight line forward prior to starting a plan.
I believe being able to charge while parked on a charging station is a pretty certain location cue. You could use that to allow plan start with dead reckoning for a certain distance/time.
Such a feature (with an option to disable it) would also certainly prolong Yarbo’s lifespan and mitigate issues with snow/ice buildup on and around the charging station and the robot itself.
I’m curious, have you tried opening the vertical controller and do something like turn on the lights to see if it gets good GPS signal?
Here is what I’m trying to figure out. If Yarbo enters a battery saving mode does it turn off GPS? Does it take time to “warm up” GPS reception?
Does a controller activity cause it to “wake up” and get GPS signal?
This is all in theory and a moot point if you are running a scheduled event. (As in theory it would know that it needs to wake up and “warm up” GPS reception in order to be ready to run at a certain time.
Yes it has a sleep mode and the GPS does go into a sleep as well. This is why it takes a little bit to wake up when the app connects. If you have a poor docking station location, it can take even longer for the GPS to converge and go green. Sometimes minutes. If you have a good dock location, it’s usually only a few seconds to go green.
Mine does not acquire GPS any longer after docking no matter what I do. The only way to get it to acquire a signal is for me to drive it to my front yard. Before the most recent update it would reacquire GPS in about 2 minutes.
Is it just the GPS quality or does it never get to RTK status 4? I’ve had quality impact mine and it takes a couple of mins sometimes for my one in my front yard (close to house and bushes) to get RTK status 4. I can usually start a plan though even with 0.4 quality and RTK status 4.
Last I checked when this happened L2 was 12, RTK status was 4. I let it sit for approximately 5 minutes and never acquired a signal. I drove it forward about three feet, let it sit again, got nothing. Drove it to my front yard where it was able to start a plan.
Sounds like poor GPS quality. If you see that again (RTK 4) and a non-green GPS icon, look at the quality metric. Anything over 0.5 should give green. Anything under and you are in DR mode.
Hi there — thanks for the thoughtful suggestion. Since the recent update, we’ve also found that failing to start a work plan from the docking station has been a concern for some users. I’ll pass your suggestion to our product team for consideration.