Bug algorithm on robot... Difficulties on running on actual robot..

It was way more difficult and frustrating then we (Me and Konrad) initially thought.
The major problems and issues that we faced are summarized below:

1. Specifying laser driver in .cfg file

2. Timeout problem .. Laser takes time in starting
red and green light issue

3. Serial port issues...
Identifying which port on serial device.. laser is sending the output

4. Inserting the USB in correct side.. because one USB port is for serial tty/USB0 - tty/USB3 and other is for 4 to 7

5. Robot battery low so some time output is not returned well.. Make sure above 10V

6. Software related measurement issues:
a. Rotating more than desired angle
so for this we had to decrease the turnrate as it was reaching near to desired rotation value... also after it stops rotating we were checking if we need to rotate in opposite direction to get exact rotation...

b. Laser not returning data and some time data is not that accurate...

c. On stage things are simple but pioneer was behaving in lot more erratic way due to extra rotation and movement related problem... we had an accuracy of 66% in our case. when robot follows the wall accurately.

d. Path on stage was way different from actual pioneer because actual pioneer had lot of extra rotation and extra steps kind of problem... on stage it was more smooth path than on actual pioneer... We calibrated lot of variables in movement related to exact positioning and used those error correction parameters in the code...

so for example... while checking slope or distance from a point... we had to use some error value and anything lying between expected output - error value was taken as right value or condition fulfillment


After all this.. our robot does not work correctly in all the scenarios but it executes the wall following well in most of the cases...

Problem was also that there was never enough space to carry out this experiment. even if we take obstacle or wall detection distance to 1.0 meter then robot starting sensing other things because in the path their was alwyas things falling within that space...

If we give less than that then robot some time gets too close to the wall and while rotating and moving further, it collides with the wall..

Will post more difficulties later...