Example Room

Nothing special here. This is basically a pentagon type of room with a sharp corner in the far end of the room. The floor is a painted black metallic sheet while the walls are cut polystyrene insulform with magnets clued to the bottom to provide support. This environment is idea for testing robots as the walls will fall or bend with enough pressure and therefore do not harm uncontrolled robots.

The purpose is to have the SRV-1 roam around within this room while avoiding the walls. We first experimented with the built in "wander mode" of the SRV-1. This mode works fine in a spacious environment but simply keeps rotating on spot within this small room.

Part of the problem is that the camera on the SRV-1 is angled slightly up and therefore not much of the floor becomes visible. Due to the lack of visible floor we then decided to use the IR capabilities of the SRV-1 instead of vision.

The IR works nicely within its designed space requirements in a living room but are set too bright for our maze room. Turning on the IR and setting the robot within the room would completely saturate the entire room (all walls are bright white) with IR light and cause all readings to be at their maximum. Therefore IR was just not going to work either!

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