After some time away from my autonomous wall-following robot, I have started spending time with it again. The first thing that happened was I tried a long-term run in my home, only to find that the ‘mirrored-surface’ feature I added some time ago caused the robot to enter an infinite loop, even when encountering a non-mirrored surface – oops! This eventuality was such a bummer that I stopped working with the robot for several months.

When I worked up the courage to address the problem, the first thing I did was to back out the ‘mirrored-surface’ code, reverting back to the state of affairs represented by the ‘WallE3_QuickSort_V5.ino’ Arduino project. This required quite a bit more work than I had anticipated; I had thought my process of incremental builds would shield me from that – NOT! Eventually I was able to use some ‘diff’ tools to work my way through the process.

After getting the code squared away without the ‘mirrored surface’ code, I decided to take my robot out for a walk – well actually it was the robot taking me for a walk ‘in’ for a walk around the house. Here’s a link to the (not-so-short) video showing the action. I have included this as a link to the video file on my Google Drive site, because it’s too long to fit on my WordPress blog page.