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Originally Posted by mechanicalbrain
Did anyone use a optical mouse? From what I understand, besides needing a lense setup to give it any range, it only has 12 ips with a 1 to 1 lense ratio as set by NASA ( http://www.nasatech.com/Briefs/Oct05/NPO_40173.html). I guess this should be odometers in general. |
We did a lot of experimenting last year with using an optical mouse for position tracking. Mark Koors came up with the right lens for making it into a "telephoto" system, Wildstang's programmers contributed code for communicating directly with a specific mouse chip, and we had travel and turn sensing working okay as long as the height of the mouse above the carpet did not vary. However, as little as a millimeter of height change gave a significant difference in detected travel. I finally decided that it wasn't going to be possible to get consistent data from the scheme if the mouse wasn't physically in contact with the carpet.
Our robot last year used a trio of miniature "follower" omniwheels with encoders to give us feedback on forward/backward travel, sideways travel, and turn angle.