[Alan Anderson]

Vertical bounce is a severe problem for an "optical mouse" robot position tracking system. It's not a matter of focus, it's a matter of scale. When the distance from floor to sensor is not absolutely constant, the measured travel is not sufficiently repeatable for a reliable result.

Collaborating loosely with Wildstang, we worked on making it function well for much of last season. I eventually concluded that the distance problem is a showstopper, and gave up on it. I spent a lot of time working out the trigonometry for full position/rotation tracking using a pair of modified mice, and even implemented most of the code using CORDIC, but the system wasn't going to be physically capable of being any more useful than a more standard wheel/shaft encoder.