Programming Mecanum drive

[tvo]

Originally Posted by richard60

if you have two encoders then subtract one value from another the tell the code wait1msc is it does not change by that much the tell it to stop and in auto you won`t burn your motors out on the mecanums

4886a

Aperture science

good luck,

Richard P

That is a very good idea for a software breaker! I used a timeout function this year, although I think I'm going to implement this in sack attack.

[Simmons 2.0]

We had a Mechanum drive on our robot this past year.
A simple three axis (stick) drive code would be:

motor[frontRight] = Y1 - X2 - X1;
motor[backRight] =  Y1 - X2 + X1;
motor[frontLeft] = Y1 + X2 + X1;
motor[backLeft] =  Y1 + X2 - X1;

(from the ROBOTC blog post: http://www.robotc.net/blog/2011/11/2...-using-robotc/)

We made sure all our wheels went straight when the drive motors were set to full power. In Autonomous, we just made the motors go full power for the duration we wanted the robot to go straight. That would be the simplest approach. If that weren't accurate enough, I'd lower the output power and use a gyro and a PID loop to correct the drive by + or - some value to make sure it goes straight. Third, I'd use encoders on two of the wheels and make sure that they were going the same Speed/Derivative/Delta.

There still would be one problem left though; how would the robot make sure it was not unintentionally strafing off to the side?

[magicode]

You might want to check out this video I mad back when they were released: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7CujEW0wgc

[Dracco1993]

Last year we used a single encoder and a gyro to do all our autonomous controls, and this worked perfectly fine. We were able to consistently score 4 of the 5 isolation game pieces, with the errors coming mostly from how the driver set the robot up on the field.

The robot is field-orientated, meaning that it does not matter how the robot is orientated, the driver will always push forward to move the robot away from him backwards for towards him, ect. The same code that was used in telly-op for the drive, was also used in our autonomous. The only thing different was that, instead of the driver setting the drive values by moving the joystick, the values were coded into the drive function calls.

To answer the question about gyro drift/accuracy, they are accurate down to 1/10 of a degree, and we were seeing only about 1/10 of a degree of drift every 10 seconds, or 1/100 of a degree a second. This puts the total drift for a match under 2 degrees, which is well below vales that might effect performance. I was also pleasantly surprised about how well they did when they got hit. I expected them to quickly get misaligned, but that rarely ever happened.

I'm willing to help out anyone that would like it, and I can also put up the code for our field-orientated drive.

[MarkO]

Originally Posted by magicode

You might want to check out this video I mad back when they were released: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7CujEW0wgc

Excellent Tutorial!!

Paint might be simple, but it gets the Point Across to the Viewer.

You might Post your Pseudocode, or at least a Screen Shot of it in the Video...


I have Subscribed to your YouTube Channel.. I am expecting more excellent work in the Future...

[mediumdave]

Alright, this has been irking me far too long...

MarkO, why do you capitalize every few words?

It sounds like you're really excited about everything

[MarkO]

Originally Posted by mediumdave

Alright, this has been irking me far too long...

MarkO, why do you capitalize every few words?

It sounds like you're really excited about everything

Yes, I tend to Over Capitalize.....

I do it for Emphasis. ( I do use italic and bold on the Forum too, or Better Yet, Combine Both.. )

I realize that I tend to do this Emphasizing while Speaking as well. My written words are a reflection of my speech. But the written word is much harder for me to bring the points across. ( There... bold rather than Capitols... )


Also, I really am Excited about this stuff.....

( I also use multiple periods at the ends of sentences, to imply a Longer Pause. As well as liberal whitespace between thoughts, just to slow you down...)

[magicode]

Originally Posted by MarkO

Excellent Tutorial!!

Paint might be simple, but it gets the Point Across to the Viewer.

You might Post your Pseudocode, or at least a Screen Shot of it in the Video...


I have Subscribed to your YouTube Channel.. I am expecting more excellent work in the Future...

Well, thank you. I don't normally do things like that, but when I saw the mecanum wheels released, I wanted to make sure people had info on how to program them. I was going to post code as well, but then I saw that ROBOTC had posted their's, so I didn't. Hopefully I can provide more "excellent work" .