robot navigation

[zotdoc]

I am using 2 infrared lasers as beacons for my agricultural robot, with 360 Ir sensors arranged in a circular pattern, thus at any given position, there are two sensors activated by the lasers. I have developed the motion control aspect of the robot. Now I'm lost. Can someone help me with a way to translate the signals from my sensors into a computer or microcontroller of some sort to drive the robot over a pre-determined course, mostly a series of long straight lines with 180 turns at each end? Or direct me to some appropriate references. I'm not an electrical engineer, just a hobbiest.
Thanks

[desterline]

I've since lost the links, but I have copies of a couple e-papers on optical navigation. If you can't find any other resources, give me an address and I'll e-mail them to you.<p>360 sensors!? Wow, you must have some funding.<p>Curious, why didn't you implement a more conventional "scanning" system. (one sensor is spun at a constant RPM, the time between 'beacons' is converted into an angular measurment)<p>When I was studying optical nav I was disapointed to see how poor of resolution was actualy achivable. I wrote a cool tool in excel where you could 'place' the robot at any location in its 'room' (20'x20') and it would generate the beacon values.<p>I then passed these beacon values (including plus and minus tolerances) to a second routine that would calculate and graph the possible locations that could generate those beacon values. <p>Granted I designed it to use an 8 bit number to specify the degrees (resulting in binary degrees - about 1.4 real degrees per binary degree) But in the center of the room I could pinpoint to ~6 inches. Closer to the corners I wasn't able to do better than about two foot - in a 20 by 20 room that's a 10% error - abysmal. (actualy the corner ambiguity was football shaped, about 1.5 foot by about 5 foot, but you get the point)<p>-Denny

[bwts]

Just interseted in how this thing is laid out, what do u mean by beacons r these attatched to the robot and the sensors place in a circle around it? (Do u get many circular fields?)<p>B)