title: Pathfinding Algorithm for Robot
body: <p>I have a robot that uses an optical mouse as a position track. Basically, as the robot moves it is able to track change in X and Y directions using the mouse. The mouse also tracks which direction you are moving - ie negative X or positive X. These values are summed into separate X and Y registers. <br></p>
  
  <p>Now, the robot rotates in place and moves forward only. So the movement of the robot is ideally in straight lines (although the mouse tracking can pickup deviations if you veer off) at particular angles. A particular set of movements of the robot would be like:
  <br>
  A: Rotate 45 degrees, move 3 inches <br>
  B: Rotate 90 degrees, move 10 inches <br>
  C: Rotate -110 degrees, move 5 inches <br>
  D: Rotate 10 degrees, move 1 inch <br>
  But each time the mouse X and mouse Y registers give the real distances you moved in each direction.
  <br><br>
  Now, if I want to repeat the movement set going from A to D only, how can I do this using the information I have already gathered. I know I can basically sum all the angles and distances I feed into it already, but this would prove to be inaccurate if there were large errors in each movement orders. How can I use the raw information from my mouse? A friend provided an idea that I could continuously sine and cosine the mouse values and calculate the final vector but I'm not really sure how this would work.</p>
  
  <p>The problem is that the mouse only gives relative readings so rotating or moving backwards, you are potentially erasing information. So yeah, what I am wondering is how you can implement the algorithm so it can continually track changes to give you a shortest path if you moved in zigzags to get there originally.</p>