I'm looking at playing with some basic robotics, I'm looking at building a simple bot that navigates around a room. The idea is that it would find edges and as it goes it would build up a map of the area.
Once that's done I'd like it to be able to walk methodically over the entire area to find any obstacles inside the area.
Does anyone know of algorithms that do this kind of thing?
You could see what you can find about the Roomba algorithm, since it's doing much of the same thing. The strategy they used was to find the size of the room and then traverse the area at random, where the overall size of the room determined how long to operate to ensure full coverage.
Try this:
http://carmen.sourceforge.net/intro.html
CARMEN is an open-source collection of software for mobile robot control. CARMEN is modular software designed to provide basic navigation primatives including: base and sensor control, logging, obstacle avoidance, localization, path planning, and mapping.