Docking station location

Yarbo Product Talk
1

I wish to locate my docking station inside of my garage. The data center will be less that 75 feet away with a clear view through my double garage door. Will that work?

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2

It is not recommended. Your rover needs to have reliable GPS signals. That is the purpose of the two RTK antennas on the rover. It works in coordination with the Data Center to determine its position but it can’t do that if the satellites are obstructed. What people have done is to place the dock in the garage and manually drive it on and off. Once you leave the garage the rover will usually get GPS signal and then you can start your automated work plan.

3

As Bryan said. If you manually drive off the Docking Station to start a Work Plan, in addition to driving where you get GPS, you need to be in a mapped location (Area, etc.) that will allow the rover to navigate where it needs to in order to start the Work Plan.

I park the rover in my garage sometimes, and I have an Area right outside of the garage the rover can use to get anywhere else on the property. I drive the rover out, plop it there, wait for GPS, and start any Work Plan I want.

When the Work Plan finishes, if there’s no Docking Station installed in the App to go back to, use Smart Vision to get the rover back into your garage and up on the pad to charge.

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4

I would love this, but I see a few challenges in use with this.

  1. App does not allow the dock to be installed with no GPS.
  2. If you drive the rover off the dock, there is no return to home (RTH) for the rover to recharge.
  3. Cannot do this with schedules.

This is a critical feature for me as the weather here is volatile. Sometimes hail up to ping pong ball size and direct sun will fade and warp plastics. Not to mention the beating the battery will take sitting in the heat.

I was hoping I could use this with API’s or automation to charge the rover in my garage and then have it drive out to the driveway to get GPS and start a work area. Then when it was done, drive to the last GPS location and work its way back to the dock. I have not found a way to do this. Any recommendations?

5

You can do a no docking station install. This creates a virtual docking location where the rover uses as home base. If you execute a work plan it will go back to this base location when it’s complete. At that point you could then drive it to your indoor charger manually. You still see a weird looking dock in the app where this location is. If you hit recharge, that’s where it’s going to go.

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I think this makes sense. I’ll have to mess with the app to see if I can figure this out. My issue is that I want it to charge on the dock in the garage. I have attempted to drive the rover manually with the camera to the dock to charge, but this was impossible for me to do.

If I can set up a virtual dock in the garage, I will put the actual dock there to charge. I know there is no GPS in the garage and think this will prohibit me from doing what I want to do.

7

Yeah you’ll need good GPS where you do this. Docking through smart vision is tough but doable with practice. It only uses one camera so it throws everything off a little. I think it might be left. Can’t remember which.

8

Does disabling my one an only charging station turn into a virtual docking station installation?

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9

Curious about this too.

10

I don’t think so, it would just grey out the docking station. It is a specific install method when doing the docking station install process.

11

Thanks for the info @bryan.wheeler

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