This is my first year in VEX, and I am assigned to program for our robots. One of the functions my teammates told me to finish is the odometry stuff. With the help of some online resources, I did come up with a function that tracks the position and the angle of the robot relative to the starting poi…

Yes, you are correct that odometry will give you position relative to where your robot starts. Most teams will use a consistent starting location, often lining their robot up with landmarks such as the edge of a field tile. If you truly desire localization that does not depend on starting location, …

You will get some “search the forum” advice for this question, here’s a previous topic to get you started. [image] Odometry Coding VEXcode V5 Tech Support Hi my name is Sai from 355T and I have been trying to learn the coding and math around odometery but I just can not u…

Thank you for your time to reply. However, most online resources only discuss the calculations behind odometry. Yet the main problem I had was the role of the odometry. If I’m correct, the position of the robot calculated by the odometry algorithm is relative to the robot’s initial position. So if I…

[image] DinoC: I’m just curious about the usual way to solve this problem. Typically you would solve this issue by always placing your robot at a known position before the match. Alternatively, you could use a GPS sensor (although I’ve heard that there are accuracy issues) or multiple distanc…

Yeah, plain odometry is based off of the initial position. For some, this is good enough and they can eyeball it or use an alignment mechanism. However, a better way to is to implement other sensors to help correct the position such as GPS and/or distance sensors. With these you can fix the estimate…

Thanks for your help! And yes, the Monte Carlo localization seems to be unnecessary. I think I’ll go with the wall reset method. Thank you for giving me a bigger picture.

I also heard similar concerns about the GPS sensor. Thank you for your suggestion, I think distance sensors would work for me.

Interesting, I might also do some research about the Kalman filters. Thanks!

How does odometry works?

Programming Support VEXcode V5 Tech Support

jpearman August 18, 2025, 2:41am 2

You will get some “search the forum” advice for this question, here’s a previous topic to get you started.