In this lab, we use the fully assembled robot (mainly the ToF sensors, IMU, the open-loop control established in Lab 6) to allow the robot to map its surroundings and identify viable paths. I also reviewed Lecture 2 (transformation matrices) before beginning work on this lab.
Task 1: Program your robot to spin around its own axis in small increments interspersed with brief stops to record ToF readings.
Task 2: Execute your complete turn in an enclosed space.
Task 3: Observe how precise the turns are by plotting them in polar coordinates.
Task 4: Compute the transformation matrices and convert the measurements the distance sensor to the inertial reference frame of the room.
Task 5: Manually estimate where the actual walls/obstacles are based on your scatter plot, and convert into a line-based plot that can be placed in the simulator. To do this after my robot is able to map the obstacle course in the lab, I would draw lines on top of the scatter plot generated by the turn and estimate coordinates for each vertex of the perceived map. I would then save two lists containing the vertices formatted as (x_start, y_start) and (x_end, y_end) to plot the entire obstacle course.