I'm reviewing GPS-based navigation algorithms and studying Chris's source code for the Geocrawler 3. (My team is due to make a Powerpoint presentation to our principal in two weeks for funding). I think I can make sense of most of it but one thing that stuck out to me was that the subroutine to get the angle via the arctangent function came after another subroutine to determine the bearing.I'm not familiar with what the Parallax GPS outputs (or GPS in general, I only know of the degrees, minutes, decimal minutes format), so until now it was my understanding that bearing and angle were one and the same. Could someone explain the difference to me?
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I think you're referring to "heading", not bearing. In my code, heading refers to the direction the plane is headed as reported by the GPS. "Angle" refers to calculated angle to get from the current lat-lon to the waypoint. If the plane is on track, the two should be more or less the same. So if the heading is not the same as the angle, then the rudder needs to turn in the correct direction to line those two up.
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I think you're referring to "heading", not bearing. In my code, heading refers to the direction the plane is headed as reported by the GPS. "Angle" refers to calculated angle to get from the current lat-lon to the waypoint. If the plane is on track, the two should be more or less the same. So if the heading is not the same as the angle, then the rudder needs to turn in the correct direction to line those two up.