Alternative to inertial sensor

[muyguapo]

I am having trouble with getting my autonomous turns right, and I need a sensor to help with this. I know that the inertial sensor would be the best option, but I haven’t got one and I have a comp coming up. Is there any alternative methods or sensors that I could possible use?

Thanks in advance,
Sunay

[Dave-TBR]

You can try using motor encoders to turn somewhat accurately. Motor encoders are built into each vex motor, so there is no need to add anything onto your robot. I’m currently using motor encoders for my forward/backward movement, but I’m sure you could find a way to use motor encoders for turning. In order to use motor encoders, you use a “spinTo” command. Hope this helps, let me know if you have any other questions.

[iseau395]

You can use odometry for rotation, however this needs tracking wheels on your robot to function and may be difficult to program.

An easier alternative if you just need a basic turning function is to use math to calculate how much to spin the wheels to turn the robot a certain amount, like in this post:

Base Turning Code

Before my team got an inertial sensor, we did something like this. You can figure out how much to move the wheels by imagining they are on a circle centered on the center of your robot. This circle is the path that the wheels travel on when you turn. This means that to turn 360 degrees, your wheels need to travel the distance equal to the circumference of this circle, in opposite directions. You can then multiply the circumference by the amount you want to turn divided by 360 to get the amount t…

You can then use spinTo commands to spin the wheels to the rotations you calculated.