Hey everyone. Recently, my team and I decided to purchase the GPS sensor to help us with our autonomous Skills Runs, however we havent been finding any success.
countless hours of research helped in some cases. we found the sensor doesnt need to be calibrated, and weve also managed to keep it locked on a certain angle, but it overall has been a pain to work with when trying to get it to move after locking on an angle while adjusting for any drifting it may have.
Does anyone have any tips or examples they would be able to provide. We’re just a team of 4 and dont have a lot of mentorship so any help is appreciated.
We also dont have an inertial sensor. Our drive train consists of 2 motors on each side, providing power to 6 total wheels through a series of gears. Also just found the PID stuff but am kinda struggling to understand it all.
Despite being a very expensive sensor, it left many people disappointed and, probably, was rushed into production for the purpose of supporting IFI patent application.
Since you cannot return it back to VEX or exchange it for inertial sensor, I would try to use it strictly as way to verify/reset robot’s absolute location every 15-20 seconds (while standing motionless for 1-2 sec) during programming skill runs and rely on odometry for the rest of your route. However, before GPS was released, resetting absolute robot location was traditionally done by touching field barrier, field element, or reading IR line sensor while driving over floor tape lines and it worked great for many teams.
So, the best tip would be to invest you time to learn about PID, odometry, path planning and tracking algorithms like Pure Pursuit, for all of which there are many pointers and tips, if you search this forum.
And, in case if anyone from VEX/IFI is reading this, in my opinion, the only way to turn VEX GPS from an ultimate lemon and failed product into something useful for VRC and student education in general, would be to open source its firmware and allow any team to modify it and use sensor’s camera and processing power in any way they see fit in VRC context.