Optical Mouse Navigation

[phrontist]

Originally Posted by Jizvonius

If you guys don’t mind a little mechanical system involved in your navigation, you can control the surface quality that your optical system sees and the distance to that surface.

The system requires an interface between the carpet and your optical sensors. Say, a ball with a textured surface (ball size and material must take into account carpet properties). The sensors and ball are a fixed distance from each other by attaching the sensors to the ball cradle. Now to minimize slippage on the ground, have the entire apparatus slide up and down on a track with downward force provided by a constant tension spring.

This isn’t a completely thought through design yet, and yes, it is just a higher resolution encoder. But it is free spinning (deals with pushing and drive train slippage), much higher resolution, and with a little math you may be able to calculate yaw (depending on the placement of the ball and sensors).

It seems that we will either have to deal with mechanical or optical slop either way, so instead of having your sensors losing focus, you can just have the minimized slippage of a free spinning ball (and yell at your mechanical team if it’s not working). Anyway let me know what you guys think.

Bah! If I get that desperate I'd just make a really low friction housing for the assembly and put it in direct contact with the ground, with the ability to retract up into the robot's body. I'm no where near that desperate yet.