Errors
Dead reckoning may give the best available information on position, but is subject to significant errors due to many factors as both speed and direction must be accurately known at all instants for position to be determined accurately. For example, if displacement is measured by the number of rotations of a wheel, any discrepancy between the actual and assumed diameter, due perhaps to the degree of inflation and wear, will be a source of error. As each estimate of position is relative to the previous one, errors are cumulative.
Read more about this topic: Dead Reckoning
Famous quotes containing the word errors:
“When a Man is in a serious Mood, and ponders upon his own Make, with a Retrospect to the Actions of his Life, and the many fatal Miscarriages in it, which he owes to ungoverned Passions, he is then apt to say to himself, That Experience has guarded him against such Errors for the future: But Nature often recurs in Spite of his best Resolutions, and it is to the very End of our Days a Struggle between our Reason and our Temper, which shall have the Empire over us.”
—Richard Steele (16721729)
“My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.”
—Michel de Montaigne (15331592)
“Repent, repent, and from old errors turn!
Who listened to his voice, obeyed his cry?
Only the echoes, which he made relent,
Rung from their marble caves Repent! Repent!”
—William Drummond, of Hawthornden (15851649)