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Based on what you said above, if your robot is up against a hard barrier and is spinning it's wheels, will it throw off all of your calculations because your encoders would be still spinning? Or is your encoder non-powered so that it just follows the terrain and doesn't spin when against a barrier. I would definately like to know more about this 'Wild' system.
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You are correct that "if" the wheels started spinning it would throw off our position calculations, but the wheels have a gummy belting on them that doesn't slip easily. When we run up against a wall on the carpet, we end up stalling the motors.
Early in design, stalling the motors became a major concern for us in autonomous mode so we also created a board that is capable of measuring current draw on our motors so we could detect a stall condition. We shipped the board with our robot but we haven't spent any time actually integrating it into the StangPS system. Our current monitoring is almost exactly what we used last year ("StangSense") to report motor current back to a Palm that was connected to the OI. We hope to work on integrating those two pieces together and have it working before Houston, but we haven't found that it as necessary as we expected during early design since we haven't run into a stall condition for more than a few seconds.