Post 7 - Now, where have I been? - Part 1
Hello folks. It’s been a while since my last post – almost 6 months! But I’m here again with another update, at last. It’s been a busy time (I think all my posts start like that, lol) but it really has. I took on a contract job in February (got to pay the bills!) which has me working at a clients 9-5 Monday – Friday, which has drastically cut down my time available for developing the robots. But I’ve managed to make some progress, none the less. In this post I’m going to describe the next step in my robot’s evolution – constructing a map of its environment. What that means is that the robot moves around as before, using an ultrasonic sensor to avoid obstacles, but this time, as the robot moves around, it plots its position, and the position of obstacles, on a map which can be displayed on a PC screen. How it knows its position is by using odometry and the magic of mathematics (my maths tutor was right, it has come in useful after all! Lol). For an