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I am designing a robot, and need to track the distance and direction of the robot motion, Nothing in 3D, I only need x,y and angle in x y plane.

My question :

  1. Is it possible to use gyro and accelerometer with kalman filtering or any other methods to track this? (I do not have motor encoders)

My constraints : I do not have space to include a gps (due to power requirements) or motor encoders (due to motor support)

srinathhs
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1 Answers1

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No, not really. If you integrate the accelerometer values twice you get position but the error is horrible. It is useless in practice.

Here is an explanation why (Google Tech Talk) at 23:20.

A related question is probably this.

Community
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Ali
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  • My application is a robot (wheeled), I have decided to put in accelerometer and a gyro on the circuit board to determine how much the bot has moved, is this enough to calculate the value? – srinathhs Mar 11 '11 at 04:04
  • OK, I see. Kalman filter will work only if you have some external reference position such as GPS that does not drift. So it seems to me the answer is no to your question. :( In my application I measure angles but I do not compute position directly (by integration). – Ali Mar 11 '11 at 10:12