View Single Post
  #3   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 01-02-2011, 20:04
ajd ajd is offline
Registered User
FRC #3238
Team Role: Alumni
 
Join Date: Feb 2010
Rookie Year: 2010
Location: Mount Vernon, WA
Posts: 46
ajd will become famous soon enough
Re: Gaff tape on carpet

Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle View Post
This was my experience as well. Official gaffers tape on unofficial carpet didn't have enough contrast regardless of mounting height. Actually, our office has two colors of carpet intermingled, and it worked fine on one and not on the other.

My solution was to overlay the clear packaging tape over the gaffers tape. This upped the tape reflectance in the IR range so that it was easy to distinguish from the carpet.

As long as you get there to be a line of high contrast material, it doesn't matter whether you use shiny overlay, different carpet, or different tape altogether; as long as it allows you to distinguish and program the robot to drive it, then at the event on Thursday, you can calibrate for the official carpet and tape combo.

Greg McKaskle
Thanks, we'll do that. We are a little bit concerned about the mounting height - how can we test how high we can mount the sensor off the ground? We want to mount it above the bumper zone to make it easier to adjust the sensors (so the bumpers don't get in the way), but we don't know if that will be too high for them to sense the tape....
Reply With Quote