After last week's meeting, I brainstormed some ideas on how to improve the cart location tracking system as well as navigation for the carts. I looked into how trains and other forms of transit operate their train-to-train systems. They have a block system in place that keeps tabs on which train is in which block. We were planning to somehow overlay a coordinate grid on the old track to correlate important areas such as turns, long straightaways, and stations to specific blocks or number of blocks.
There are several methods that can be implemented to track the movements of the carts with the coordinate grid. "rFID" chips were proposed to be installed on each cart to give each cart a specific id. These ID's would be picked by the sensors at the beginning of a block and the end of a block and be communicated back to the main hub. Although this may seem plausible, the reaction time for these chips may be too slow as stated by our mentor. For now, other forms of wireless Local Positioning systems are still being looked into.
Figure 1 - Original Track with Grid system overlayed
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