I am going to use a vertical tracking wheel and I’m wondering if I should use a horizontal one too if I already use an inertial sensor?
Thanks
It is by no means necessary (both myself and our sister team just had a vertical one), but if you have the room, I think that you might want to consider having both.
Especially on this game, which doesn’t require your bot to be able to mount anything, it might be helpful, but it is absolutely not necessary.
First of all, what is a verticle tracking wheel and what is a horizontal sheel and what are you trying to accomplish
One vertical + one horizontal + inertial sensor is the golden standard.
Any less will diminish tracking quality drastically.
You’d be surprised how much horizontal drift your robot gets, so while the vertical tracking wheel does a lot of the heavy lifting, the horizontal wheel is still very important. The last time I couldn’t fit a horizontal wheel I had distance sensors to figure out how to reset my drift.
Ooh, how did you rig that system with the distance sensors?
Vertical is for tracking robot movement forward and horizontal is for tracking robot movement when it goes side to side. The goal is for your robot to know where it is on the field precisely(motors are inaccurate and don’t account for drift), so you can have a much smoother auton.
I would highly recommend adding a horizontal tracking wheel if you have not already. While a vertical tracking wheel, also known as unicycle odometry, can work, the problem you introduce is noise in the readings. Odometry like that calculates the robot’s displacement using the IMU’s heading. However, IMUs are noisy, and as such, the calculated displacement can be incorrect. Having two odometry pods, one for the vertical and horizontal axes relative to the robot, and a subsequent program to effectively merge the two sets of calculated x and y displacements will reduce error created by noise from the IMU and rotation sensors.