I reckon encoders on the wheels will lead to a lot of error over time because of slippage. I guess there's no one sensor that can precisely give position. The more I read about autonomous robots, the more it seems that people just average the readings of multiple different types of sensors to get a position reading. So far the sensors I'm thinking of using are an accelerometer, digital compass, and ultrasonic sensor. Will a digital compass be enough to reliably determine the rotation of the robot? Will the motors interfere with it? Or should I also include a gyroscope and average compass readings with it?
mirith, the map will only be 2 dimensional, so there isn't a whole lot of data to be read/written when following/creating the map.
I was also throwing around the idea of aiming the guts of an optical mouse at the ground and getting distance readings from that. Focusing on the ground while going over bumps might be an issue and I don't know if a mouse will read correctly at high speed. What do you guys think?