AutoCone: An OmniDirectional Robot for Lane-Level Cone Placement
This work addresses the need for efficient and precise traffic management systems, offering a cost-effective solution for automated cone placement, though it appears incremental with improvements in accuracy and robustness.
The paper tackled the problem of automated traffic delineation by developing a low-cost omnidirectional robot network for lane-level cone placement, achieving a position error of 2 centimeters with RTK GPS and maintaining lane-level accuracy with a maximum error of 1.97 meters over 50 meters in GPS-denied environments.
This paper summarizes the progress in developing a rugged, low-cost, automated ground cone robot network capable of traffic delineation at lane-level precision. A holonomic omnidirectional base with a traffic delineator was developed to allow flexibility in initialization. RTK GPS was utilized to reduce minimum position error to 2 centimeters. Due to recent developments, the cost of the platform is now less than $1,600. To minimize the effects of GPS-denied environments, wheel encoders and an Extended Kalman Filter were implemented to maintain lane-level accuracy during operation and a maximum error of 1.97 meters through 50 meters with little to no GPS signal. Future work includes increasing the operational speed of the platforms, incorporating lanelet information for path planning, and cross-platform estimation.