Odometry wheels can greatly increase the accuracy of your team's autonomous! Odometry wheels are small wheels that you mount on the bottom of your robot. They are each attached to an encoder that records their position. Therefore, when your robot moves, the code knows where the robot is on the game field based on how much each of the wheels has moved. Based on this information, your team could use PID so the robot can correct itself to be in the right position if it is off course. Last season, our team used 3 odometry wheels that were mounted in the following locations: 1 on the left side of the robot parallel to the robot's wheels, 1 on the right side of the robot parallel to the robot's wheels, and 1 on the center of the robot perpendicular to the Mecanum wheels. This configuration allowed our odometry wheels to sense when our robot moved forwards, strafed, turned, or completed any combination of movements. An issue we faced with the odometry wheels is that they can make it difficult to drive over obstacles. For example, our robot was unable to cross the neutral bridge in the Skystone game because our center odometry wheel was unable to roll over it. Overall, odometry wheels can be an easy way to greatly improve your team's autonomous.
Our odometry wheel configuration
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