Xenon27:
I’m no expert on odom, but to my knowledge you theoretically only need one tracking wheel if you use an inertial sensor to get your heading. But that assumes that a tank drive will never drift side to side, which can and does happen, especially with an all omni wheel setup. To account for that I think you need one forward wheel, and one sideways one. If you don’t use an inertial sensor, 3 tracking wheels is the best option because you need 2 forward facing wheels to find the robot’s heading and forward displacement, and one sideways wheel to find the robots horizontal displacement (much more important on a holonomic drive, but tank drives do still drift sideways slightly which can throw off your values if you don’t measure that drift)
For more information on what Xenon is talking about (and position tracking odometry in general), I would highly recommend reading through 5225a’s position tracking document.
Hello World,
As you can probably tell from my post history, I’m not nearly as active here as I should be. For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Nick Mertin, and I was the head programmer for Team 5225A, The E-Bots PiLons during the 2017-2018, In The Zone season. I have since graduated, but still remain a mentor for the team.
Over the past couple of months, myself and the other programming team members and alumni, by popular demand, have been working on a document describing our Absol…