Mini map display on the Dashboard

[Kevin Phan]

So this year I've been working on coming with the concept of creating a mini map display that will tell the operator or coach where the robot is on the field. Currently it is set up with constant positions, if I had time to learn some vision processing I would have a camera determine exactly where the robot is during auto before it did anything and have the accelerometer do the work on determine the position the robot is at. This feature was on the back burner that was turned off for pretty much the entire season. I really wanted to see if this feature would work using an accelerometer. Here's the issue I've run into, how do you tell position from an accelerometer? Using simple physics you would be able to tell how far you've traveled on the x axis and the y axis, but I'm just having trouble with determining the velocity correctly when the driver jerks around or when the robot is at a constant velocity. It doesn't help that the accelerometer is not nice and neat and doesn't read a value of 0 when it is not moving. Maybe I'm just looking at this situation wrong or maybe I've got the wrong idea.