Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!fredm
From: fredm@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Fred Martin)
Newsgroups: comp.robotics
Subject: ideas for inclination sensors
Message-ID: <3717@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 16 Oct 90 04:48:31 GMT
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 23

robots must do is climb an inclinated plane.  Thus, I'm soliciting
all of you robot hackers for ideas on inclination sensors.

One obvious such thing is a mercury switch.  In fact, I plan on giving
these to all of my student robot-builders.  But, mercury switches tend
to give you only one bit of data, so either you need a lot of them
poised at strange angles, or you only get crude inclination data.

Another idea is to have a pendulum-like rod mounted on a freely
rotating shaft.  At all times, the pendulum would swing to point down,
and one could use an optical shaft encoder to measure the rotation of
the shaft.

That's about as far as we got before the ideas got pretty random.  Any
suggestions?  I'd be particularly interested in a low-cost,
commercially-available device (wouldn't we all?), although anything
reasonably easy to construct would be wonderful.


Thanks.

	- Fred Martin
	  MIT Media Lab