[John Gutmann]

i have seen people on here doing expirement with balancing robtos and they wanted to know if you could make 'segway robot' with just an accelerometer and no gyro and of coure the answer was to us distance sensors, but of coure those won't work as well on surfaces that are not level.

so i got to thinking and wondered if you could use a accerometer to measure rate of angular change by some how starting a timer when the angle starts to change and check it every X seconds and then compute it for how fast it was changing angles and then update the speed of the robot or unit? would this work? could this possibly work? would it bogg down the processor too much? would you need a co or sub processor just to handle that? would it be easier and simpler to do? less expensive, yes but how effiecient will it be?

if you can't do that can you make a program for distance sensors with some kinda of switch to measure when it is level and then adjust the distance each sensor should be at? so it will work on a slope of X degrees?

and for a balancing robot that does use distance sensors how do you know what motor speed to use and length of time they are on so you dont go past the desired angle u wish to be at?