[Ether]

Under what circumstances would you ever be commanding wheel speeds and steering angles that are not the result of an inverse kinematic calculation? If you are using kinematically correct speeds and steering angles for all four wheels, you should be getting the vehicle translational and rotational velocities which were used to compute those speeds and steering angles¹. Use those vehicle translational and rotational velocities to render the image's position in your simulation.

If your concern is about rapidly changing operator commands and the dynamic response of your steering and/or drive motors, and you are envisioning measuring actual wheel speeds and steering angles and using them to figure out where the vehicle is over time, then yes, you would need a way to compute what the vehicle is doing at each moment in time based on the measured wheel speeds and angles. How do you propose to do this computation?


¹ unless your wheels are slipping/sliding (due to an obstruction perhaps). In that case predicting vehicle motion accurately without additional sensors seems problematic.

Originally Posted by JamesTerm

"Originally Posted by JamesTerm
The other half will be the reverse of that where given the wheel angles and speeds, what is the current x, y and rotational (i.e. angular) velocities.
"

For 2 reasons... one is to render the images position on our simulation. I use text graphics on OSG (open scene graph). The other reason is for autonomous where if I can interpolate the position on a 2D field I can calculate the desired velocity and orientation to hit a target.

I have achieved these tasks with WCD, but I have not yet confirmed angular motion (logomotion did not require that). I am still researching this, but I believe I can have accurate angular turns if I have reliable encoder readings of distance. Anyhow... none of this matters if we switch to swerve.