Feasibility of Sonar Drive Adjustments

I thought I’d get input from people who’ve actually used the sonar (ultrasonic rangefinder, rip) before I jump to incredibly insane levels, especially since it would take up half of my legacy port space:
Is it feasible that someone could place two sonar sensors in the front corners of their bot facing in to calculate the position of a cube inside the bot? I thought I’d use this to automatically adjust the rotation of the bot to make it easier to pick up the cubes, but it seems a bit outlandish. If it would work, could it be done with one and the power of math?

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First of all why would a cube be different orientations inside the bot? I’m a little confused on the implementation of this.

For some of the stacker designs that I’ve seen the cube has to be pretty close to the center for the cube to be picked up. (Ie. DR4B Extending Reverse Stacker (V2)) I was just wondering if using sonar could automatically strafe to center the cube’s location in front of the bot.

Edit: autocorrect :neutral_face:

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You probably could and I like the idea but I feel like there are other(better) ideas that could accomplish this better. In ITZ many teams had small poly carbonate aligning pieces that worked very well. It also may be inconsistent unless you get the positioning of the sensors almost perfect.

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Ok I get what you want to do better now, and I don’t think ultrasonic range finders are the best solution as they are not super accurate. You would be better off having a physical aligner.

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The closest thing that we had tried was during starstruck - we used 2 ultrasound sensors to align the robot for the hang (for programming skills).
The 2 sensors were perpendicular to each other, one to align the robot to the side wall and the other facing the other wall to measure how far was the robot as it moved towards it.

It worked pretty well, in terms of consistency and accuracy. The only issue we had was the response time of the sensor. We couldn’t move the robot too fast, else by the time the reflected wave reached the sensor, the robot would be already far away from the initial position.

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I would think it is possible, but the ultrasonics aren’t perfect and you’d probably need 3 to determine the orientation well. Those ports would probably be better used for odometry.