Optical Mouse Navigation

[phrontist]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Vertical bounce is a severe problem for an "optical mouse" robot position tracking system. It's not a matter of focus, it's a matter of scale. When the distance from floor to sensor is not absolutely constant, the measured travel is not sufficiently repeatable for a reliable result.

Collaborating loosely with Wildstang, we worked on making it function well for much of last season. I eventually concluded that the distance problem is a showstopper, and gave up on it. I spent a lot of time working out the trigonometry for full position/rotation tracking using a pair of modified mice, and even implemented most of the code using CORDIC, but the system wasn't going to be physically capable of being any more useful than a more standard wheel/shaft encoder.

Could you be more specific? What tolerance are we talking about here? A centimeter, a few milimeters, or more like 3 centimeters? How much distortion are we actually talking about here? Thank you very much for pointing this out, and preventing us from repeating mistakes. You may have found the fatal flaw in this plan. C'est la vie.