Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

All of you who are attempting this, how do you suppose you will get started? I am thinking of making an omni drove robot with 2 gyros, one in the main body and one on a little platform that a server will rotate up and down. 2 IR sensors mounted on a servo that will rotate it side to side will scan in front of the robot and the other 2 mounted on the platform will also scan side to side. they will take in an array of data regarding the objects inthe way

I'm curious. Are you aware that a single hard collision can easily throw a gyro off by hundreds of degrees?

We removed our gyro from this year's competition bot - we were using it to measure inclination in order to automatically stop our winch - because each time we fired our kicker (it was a 300+ degree per second gyro) it would lose 30-40 degrees in a random direction. In fact, we tried 6 different gyros, all the ones we had in the build room, and they all showed the same results.

We used one in 2009 to make our turret field-oriented and had the same issue when we had a hard collision.

I'm also curious why you want a gyro on a platform when servos can be commanded accurately to any angle you want?