I made some progress with the pololu tracking and control project.
To allow for better control, I updated the communication protocol between the desktop program and the robot. The previous version supported a minimal set of commands (stop, forwards, spin left, spin right). This set has been replaced by a tuple of values directly controlling the speed of the left and right motors. This allows us to write a more “ambitious” target following algorithm.
The new heuristic is in two steps, speed and direction. We first determine the distance between the tracked robot and the target, and set the speed component as a proportion to distance (close = slow, far = fast). The direction is calculated in a similar fashion: we turn in the direction of the target, the bigger the angle difference between the current heading of the 3pi and the target, the stronger the turn. This remains a simple algorithm, but I a kind of like the behavior. There is more life to it. The following video illustrates (the white dot represents the position of target, the orange dot represents the position of the tracked 3pi robot).
3pi pololu robot controlled via ir tracking: second test from david hodgetts on Vimeo.