Accelerometer use

[Salik Syed]

Well I'm guessing you could place the accelerometer so that it is perpendicular to the direction your robot travels.
When the accelerometer reads ~0 you are at your 0 acceleration reading f or the Gyro(there is often a gap between true 0 and 127). This way you could recenter the gyro in real time. I would probably integrate the accelerometer reading for a few seconds and if it steadily sums to a 0 reading then you can be fairly sure the data is correct and that the current gyro reading is also a 0.

Furthermore you know that the accelerometer isn't biased towards a single side, so when you turn in two different directions you can figure out how much bias is in the gyro by looking at the integrals of the accelerometer over time and based on this you can probably calculate how to re-scale the gyro output by comparing the two different sets of integrals for each side.

I don't think noise should be too much of a problem, we are taking so many readings per second that if it is fairly random it will average out to zero over a short period.

I'm assuming the accelerometer supports acceleration in two directions??? is this true?

[chris31]

Originally Posted by Salik Syed

Well I'm guessing you could place the accelerometer so that it is perpendicular to the direction your robot travels.
When the accelerometer reads ~0 you are at your 0 acceleration reading f or the Gyro(there is often a gap between true 0 and 127). This way you could recenter the gyro in real time. I would probably integrate the accelerometer reading for a few seconds and if it steadily sums to a 0 reading then you can be fairly sure the data is correct and that the current gyro reading is also a 0.

Furthermore you know that the accelerometer isn't biased towards a single side, so when you turn in two different directions you can figure out how much bias is in the gyro by looking at the integrals of the accelerometer over time and based on this you can probably calculate how to re-scale the gyro output by comparing the two different sets of integrals for each side.

I don't think noise should be too much of a problem, we are taking so many readings per second that if it is fairly random it will average out to zero over a short period.

I'm assuming the accelerometer supports acceleration in two directions??? is this true?

Yes. I assume that he will be using the kit accelerometer which is a DAA.