turtlebot gmapping large area
I have tried unsuccessfully to map a large area using gmapping. The map creation was working, and yesterday I created smaller maps. However, today, after about 45 minutes of driving, the Turtlebot stops and I get the errors in the gmapping output: "could not get robot pose". Also, I noticed that the create power LED is off, and in one case I got a power error on the dashboard. The battery display showed that there was plenty of power.
Then, I turned the create back on and the robot briefly found it's pose. I started driving again, and the robot jumped off the map and I got the "out of bounds" errors in gmapping. It seems it wasn't able to recover from that first stop.
I was trying to map a rectangular hallway area in an office building. The long edge is about 60 meters, and about 30 meters on the short edge. I went around about 2 and 2/3 times trying to get the loop to close when the Create stopped. So, I estimate that it traveled about 500 meters.
Do the Create's motors get hot and cause the create to shutdown? What conditions would cause a power off? Any insight into the practical run-time of the Turtlebot would be appreciated.
Incidentally, after the first time this happened, I changed the map resolution to 10cm, in case it was running out of map space.
Thank you. I was able to get each hallway in separate runs, but I never got the whole floor in a single run without costmap "out of bounds" errors or the Create powering itself off (I am still investigating why that happens). I merged the maps as you suggested (using Gimp) and was able to load it.