MPU6050

Introduction

Robotino3 is equipped with a gyroscope mounted on the internal I/O-board. The gyroscope is a MPU6050. MEMS gyroscopes in general have two major problems. These are drift and scale.

Drift

When the gyroscope is not rotated the output signal should be zero. Unfortunately the gyroscope produces small random output signals even if not rotated. These random signals are called drift. On Robotino we now pretty well when the robot and therefor the gyroscope is not rotated. This is the case when the encoders from all three drive motors output 0. 500ms after we read zero from the three encoders we store the current output signal of the gyrosope and subtract this stored value from all gyroscope signals measured later. This ensures that the gyroscope signal is zero when the robot is not rotating. This also means that you can fool this mechanismn of drift compensation by taking up Robotino and rotate it without rotating the wheels.