Quote:
Originally Posted by Ether
In another earlier post, dbeckwith suggested a Bezier curve. I believe the instantaneous vehicle rotation rate for a given vehicle forward speed can also be computed from the parametric Bezier equations, but I haven't actually done it yet.
|
The reason I suggested them is because they are parametric, so I thought they might be easier to deal with, and also you can control the shape of the curve in without changing the tangents at the endpoints easily, which I'm not sure you can do with cubic curves.
This is all really cool by the way, I'd love to try to implement this in our robot, even if it isn't entirely practical or needed, just because it's such an interesting problem. Another layer of complexity to add with our robot though is that we use Mecanum drive, so basically we could have the robot drive along the curve with the X and Y coordinates being affected by forward and strafing motion, and the heading just constantly changing by itself from the first tangent to the last.
I think that actually brings up another problem though, which I've been wondering about for a while: how do you get a robot with Mecanum drive to drive completely straight while turning at a constant rate (as in, the overall motion of the robot is in a straight line, but it is constantly rotating)? This might be going way beyond what the OP was looking for, but it was just something I was thinking about since we have Mecanums.