First off, I'm completely new to the forums, never posted here before, so tell me if I'm violating any rules or such. =)
My team's finally getting to programming autonomous mode for the competition and the first question that came up was naturally: "how do we measure distance?" After brainstorming for a while we settled on two easiest (or seemingly easiest) ways of figuring out the distance our robot has traveled:
1) Timer - we can determine the time it takes for our bot to accelerate to a certain speed and same for deceleration and plug the rest in the distance/time formula. This methods is perhaps the easiest, but seems very unreliable, mostly because the motors never spin up the same way, and this inconstancy should get the bot at least a foot off target.
2) A distance measurer of some sort. By this I mean a device that literally rolls on the ground counting the rotations, which we can then multiply by circumference and figure out the distance. My only real problem with this method is the method of output - a problem that can be overcome.
I was wondering if any of you could pin point any flaws in my logic here or recommend a better way of measuring distance that the bot's traveled.
Also, feel free to discuss any means of measuring distance in this thread.
Eldar (Sum of all Forces - ΣF - Team #1888)