Design and development of an autonomous maze solving robot

Abstract

Nowadays, the working hours are getting longer and people are concerning the personal hygiene very much. So there is a need for people to have an automatic cleaner robot.

The idea of this final year project is to build an autonomous maze solving robots for providing a better cleaning solution. This is a totally new proposed project and the author was starting from scratch. During the first phase of the project, the hardware of robot has not been done. The solving algorithm was designed at that time by implementing into a windows application using Visual Basic.NET and it was tested by controlling through its graphical user interface (GUI). The author can change the condition of maze in the GUI then the program will generate the solution.

The solver was then converted from VB.NET to embedded C programming language when the hardware was finished. The Proportional-Derivative (PD) controller and motion profile generator was also developed during the first phase, but they can only be tested after implementing into the robot.

After the robot was assembled completely and the hardware initialization was done, the author started to design and develop the auto-navigation module in order to help the robot when it is exploring the maze. There are a few of navigation methods implemented as it is an autonomous robot which must be able to avoid the obstacles

and compensate the errors due to slippage of wheels. After that, a communication was then developed into the robot in order to allow users to adjust the parameters that will be used in the system easier. The users can tune the robot’s performance by changing the values, so it is more convenient for users to tune by using the serial communication via the computer instead of

downloading whole program.