Relative Velocity I

Two toy vehicles approach each other from opposite directions. The horizontally placed
meter stick in the background is used for a distance scale.
Using DataPoint, you should first run through the clip marking the positions of one vehicle.
Paste these values into the spreadsheet.
You should now run through the video clip once more and mark the positions of the other
vehicle. Paste these values into the same spreadsheet, being careful to make sure the time
values match for each vehicle.
Once again, we are only concerned with the horizontal movement, so all y values can be
deleted from the spreadsheet columns.
Move your origin to any convenient location by adding or subtracting some value from each
x position value. Use the meter stick in the video background for scaling purposes.
You can graph the motion of each vehicle separately or on the same coordinate axes. One
vehicles position-time graph will have an upward slope (positive velocity) and the positiontime graph of the other vehicle will have a downward slope (negative velocity), indicating
that they were moving in opposite directions.
Relative velocity is found by subtracting the velocity data points of each vehicle. The
velocity of Vehicle A relative to Vehicle B is found by subtracting the velocity of Vehicle B
from the velocity of Vehicle A.
Another way of determining one vehicles velocity relative to the other is to subtract one
vehicles position locations from the others position locations. This calculation therefore
results in the distance the two vehicles are apart from each other at every movie frame. After
graphing these new values, the slope of this difference is the relative velocity.