This project was to build a robot which will autonomously navigate, learn, and find the goal point in a line maze. The robot can potentially search the entire maze in trying to find the exit because it must learn the structure of the maze as it navigates it. There’s no way for the robot to know the best course through the maze before it tries everything. This is interesting it explores robot learning, and combines it with PID control for line following, and path planning for navigating what it already knows. Given the vast amount of different systems that need to work for the robot to work this robot was a huge challenge.

The project is split into two components. A command & control interface (the brains) written in C#, and a low level sensory/motor program (the brawn) written in NXC [flavor of C]. The sensory program runs directly on the robot and communicates with the "brains" via high level bluetooth commands. I chose C# because I felt that it was a good opportunity to experiement with multithreading in C#. It was also very easy to make a quick UI for monitoring and control purposes.

I have included a paper with more details as to how the robot was designed and implemented.