Dual Cameras - Dual Purposes

[faust1706]

Originally Posted by Invictus3593

If I used a gyro and the kinect sensor together and had a small diagram of the field and our robot on it (to scale of the field), couldn't I use the gyro for orientation? On the kinect side, I was thinking that maybe taking the accelerometer data and calculating speed and time to get the distance traveled, then compare that to the gyro data and move the diagramed robot accordingly.

does the gyro provide speed and time? I have never used one so I have no idea. If it does, there may be no reason to call the kinect's accelerometer at all, just use the gyro to help plot the diagram maybe?

If you aren't knowledgeable with calculus, to get position out of acceleration, you have to integrate the graph of the values twice, but that won't be too hard considering how powerful of machines laptops. If you do this for x, y and z, you get orientation in relation to your starting position. A problem we have with our gyro is that it drifts, so it starts climbing at an exponential rate. i have a vivid memory of our gyro climbing at 10 rps (revolutions per SECOND) while testing our motors in the pit to make sure everything was running smoothly. While the gyro climbing isn't the worst thing in the world, it is when you use the gyro for machanuum (spelling?) wheels. I haven't heard of many teams having this problem, but we have it, so it affects what we do. The gyro we have just gives pitch roll and yaw based off our initial orientation, which helps us for machanuum driving but nothing else.

I really like the idea of using the accerlometer in the kinect, it's already there, so why not use it, right?