map-finding robot

One of my recent robotics classes involved programming a robot to explore a maze using a LIDAR. This is it!

Frontier Detection

We created a program to display a color coded map:

Grey/Blue was unknown territory

Green showed LIDAR point clouds

Black was known walls

Yellow was frontier, or areas yet to be explored

Red was artificially added 'padding'

(or 'unwalkable' area for navigation purposes)

Our robot was equipped with a LIDAR that returned a point cloud suggesting an object nearby to the robot.

You can see the live updating point cloud on my computer as I move an object nearby.

The robot was programmed to explore a full map and then return to the starting position.

After this, if you picked it up and moved it anywhere in the maze, it would localize it's position and return home.