Thread: Optical Mouse Navigation
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Unread 14-03-2005, 19:33
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Re: Optical Mouse Navigation
Well with my season over I am now working on some non FIRST related robotics projects. The first (and more relevant to this discussion) of these is trying to build a robot that can navigate our school, and build a sonar map which it can use for plotting routes between its location and its destination. The robot will be based around a PC running linux. Right now I am just toying with the idea of trying to use an optical mouse for measuring travel.

As far as mounting height why dont you just use a regular optical mouse mounted on one of the skinny pneumatic rams with a regulator regulating the pressure down to say 10 psi. Then you mount the ram such that it is not fully extended when the mouse is on the ground, so the mouse will always be being gently pressed on the ground. Then if you encounter terrain that is unsuitable for the mouse (put a sonar range finder pointing at the ground in front of the mouse to detect bumps) you simply retract the ram until you are back on flat ground. Just a thought.