Is it possible in any way to use a 3-axis accel+tilt sensor as dirrection sens?

Projects General Guidance
1

So I want to make a robot that can navagate a path(hallway), then find it's way back along the path it just took.
The only problem is the robot does not have any way to sense which dirrection it is facing.
I wish the Parallax continuos rotation servo encoded it's movements,
But as far as i can tell you need a seprate sensor to do that with servos...
Also I don't have any working compass sensors... (Just a KMZ52 chip, but nothing to put it on)
What I do have is a 3-axis accelerometer with tilt sensor....
Can I use this to sense the way my robot is facing?
I know the accel. sensor whould either need additional hardware, say some mechanics that tilt the sensor everytime a wheel does 1 revolotion...
or having it extening out of the robot to measure acceleration when the robot turns....

is there any other way i can do this?
-Thanks-

2

Maybe if you made the hallway slope, that might help.

3

i think u r confused...
the "hallway" is a room in my house.
i don't plan on any renavations in the near future

4

No, I'm not confused.
You asked if there was a way, so I pointed one way out.

Another way would be to place a planetary-scale mass at one end of the hallway, but I guess they're hard to come by.

5

ok sorry
how about any way to get this to work that only involves the robot being modified?
also please excuse my poor spelling...

6

Also any Planet that I put in my hallway would become a real nightmare...
Due to the fact that you only need to shrink a planet, say the earth, to about half the size it is currently it becomes a black hole...(which is still around 1million times larger than my halllway)

so if u put a equivalently sized planet in my hallway... well.. it won't be very nice to have a black hole that is 1Million times worse than normal!!! lol

7

Also I don't have any working compass sensors... (Just a KMZ52 chip, but nothing to put it on)

Well, the cheapest solution would be to get a working compass sensor. A 3-axis accelerometer just won't be able to give you any sort of usable direction data.

8

Hmm how exact does it have to be? From the acceleration you can calculate the speed, from the speed the distance.
you could calculate the distance the robot drove in 5 second steps, and then trace it back in these 5 second windows.

p.s.

a = s/t² <=> a * t² = s

since you know a and t....