Motion Planning and sensor integration

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Originally Posted by phurley67

First off I want to thank everyone involved in the Motion Planning presentation (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...otion+profile). I believe I understand the concepts and benefits well enough to explain it to our kids (which is always the hard part).

But I have a follow up question: when creating motion plans, we can determine our expected orientation, using a gyroscope we can tell if we are "on point" or not -- but should we use this extra information or rely solely on wheel encoders? Do you use a gyro and a similar motion planning process to automate a rotation or in practice do you find wheel encoders sufficient?

Perhaps to phrase the question in a different way, if my robot has both wheel encoders and gyroscope, and one sensor type does not match the other with respect to my calculated trajectory. Which do I trust or is there a smarter way to integrate all inputs into the motion plan?

Buy a decent gyro and use that. While observing the encoders may work most of the time, there's a small probability that the wheels may slip or that your frame may twist and pull a wheel off the ground, leading to inaccurate measurements. You /should/ only ever have to drive straight and turn in place in a typical FRC autonomous mode.