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Preston_5564C07.fm Page 238 Monday, September 26, 2005 5:38 AM

238 CHAPTER 7 ■ NAVIGATION

identical rotation characteristics, you should be fine with setting them at the same speed.
However, make sure you take some measurements of how fast your robot moves for a given
speed in a given unit of time. Since I am not using encoders, I had to calibrate Feynman5 on
two surfaces—cement and carpet—for specific speeds.

Code Objective

The code objective here is to create a navigation class that gives the robot the ability to dead
reckon.

Code Discussion

Figure 7-8 shows the three classes that will handle basic navigation.

Figure 7-8. The three classes that handle basic navigation: Navigation, MotionVector, and
DistanceVector

Of the two classes required to get our robot to perform dead reckoning, the first one we are
going to discuss is MotionVector. MotionVector represents the heading and time of any movement