Hard work has paid off and I have managed to complete a batch of assignments to open up a window to get more work done on this project.
Yesterday I fired up K9 from his long hibernation on top of my wardrobe and prepared a sizeable area for him to map.
I discovered a hardware fault with the drive system where the right side is underpowered and appears to be a loose connection somewhere on the motor drive circuit board. Just poking around to find the fault seems to have cured it for now so I am going to leave it as it is as investigating in detail is going to take up valuable time.
I have now got K9 mapping an area with some assistance. Turning is not an exact science in this case and the robot needs correcting sometimes. This could be rectified by throwing more money at it and incorporating a digital compass or some more accurate wheel encoders but I do not have time nor money for these.
As expected the robot maps and leeps turning with a preference for left until it spirals in on itself at which point the software gets stuck into a loop and has to be terminated with task manager. At this point this is exactly what I wanted it to do. There is a small bug where the motor values are getting erased on multiple turns but I am hoping to find that one today.
I have also Implemented the bump switches and pause feature so that the robot doesnt try to climb the furniture and walls and also the pause button allows manual course corrections to be made.
I will upload some video of the mapping in action when I get a minute.
Next step is to implement a search algorithm so that when the robot spirals in and stops it will then search its database for a nearby square to go to and start mappping again.
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