Camera View

This view is from the robot looking towards the sharp corner as seen in the following overview image.

The robot view is a nice image but as the machine approaches the wall the black floor quickly disappears. To remedy this issue we need to tilt the camera down a little to see more floor. The SRV-1 camera is attached to the robot using double sided sticky tape. You can carefully un-stick part of the camera and simply prop it downwards to reveal more of the floor. This simple movement of the camera now allows us to see enough floor to be usable within our maze room.

Another possibility is to bend the aluminum bracket that holds the camera downwards a bit. There is enough room under the bracket to change the angle between 10-15 degrees which should be plenty. From the Surveyor folks themselves: "The only caveat is to make certain that there's no contact between the bracket and the front of the battery."

The robot is in the same position. Compare with first image above. Notice the floor space has substantially increased. This is the modification we used:

A subtle change but now that we can see the floor we can detect the boundary between the floor and the wall using vision.

Onto the Wall Detector ...