Design and implementation of a maze navigation robot

Abstract

This project goes through the design and implementation process of an autonomous navigation robot, capable of exploring an unknown environment and perform numerous tasks such as, 2D reconstruction of the environment, self-location inside the map, finding shortest path to a given destination, map inspection and target search. The robot uses a front camera and two sensors to observe the environment and navigate inside it. The System is built around the Raspberry PI microcomputer running Raspbian operating system and programmed with Java and Python languages. The different tasks’ algorithms are first simulated in a software application, without hardware restriction in an error free environment, then implemented on the hardware design and tested inside a maze created in the laboratory. The result obtained were satisfactory, since even with some limitations, the robot performed the requested tasks.