My team doesn’t really have the space or skill to use odometry tracking wheels. We also don’t have access to any parts right now. Because of this my team was wandering if you could get any useful information by putting a inertial sensor in the exact middle of the drive. We were wandering if it would be able to sense the robot forward and backward and side to side movement with a second inertial sensor further away, sensing direction.
No, this will not work well. I’ve tried it and double integrating the IMU will not work very well as there is a lot of noise.
A better idea is to use the internal motor encoder combined with the IMU for orientation to create a odometry system where the perpendicular displacement is always assumed to be zero. This is an imperfect odometry system but will be better than nothing.