We "shotgunned" our sensors. The sensors are housed in a length of heatshrink tubing, with half of it cut away. It is pretty much exactly the same as what you would see on Kevin Watson's website. The sensors are mounted on PCB which are then fastened to a servo with industrial plastic velcro.
The entire servo/sensor assembly is enclosed in the clear plastic top of a CD spindle.
I'm going to take your advice about dead reckoning if no signal is found. I guess there isn't much to lose by having the robot just go, but I think we will try and dead reckon ourselves closer to the beacon first, then use IR to fine tune an approach to the 10pt balls. I'm going to forget about using IR right from the beginning of autonomous mode.
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Originally Posted by KenWittlief
how do you have the sensors mounted on your bot? are you restricting the angles from which the light can hit the sensor?
we have ours on inside a 1 x 2 x 4" black plastic box from radioshack, with the sensor all the way on the back side, and the front has a slit cut, about 1/8" wide and vertical on the bot
so we have a very narrow angle of view left and right and about a 45° angle up and down
have you done something similar or do your sensors have a wide angle of view?
one suggestion is if you lose the signal keep going straight ahead until you re-acquire it - we had our auton mode shutting down if something went wrong, then realized - what are we protecting by doing that? - nobody is going to get hurt if we are off course or somethings not exactly right, so we might as well at least take a shot at dead recogning - maybe we will still get the ball that way - cant hurt to try, but if you stop you definately lose out.
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