Maze Navigation and Object Retrieval Demo

Hi All:

This is a project that my son and I did together a few months ago for his school science fair. His topic was Robot Sensors — so we built a maze and wrote some code for Sparki. Sparki will navigate the maze, find an object at the END of the maze, retrieve the object, and carry it to the START of the maze where he will release it. You can start Sparki anywhere in the maze. We use START and END markers for the maze so Sparki will know where to pick up the object (if he doesn’t already have it) and where to release the object (if he has it in his possession).

The full source code, maze specs, program flow, and the special maneuvering algorithms are available on GitHub:

github.com/sivads/SJD_Maze_Find

Here is a short video demonstrating the project:

youtube.com/watch?v=UL91hlUyRVw

Questions and comments welcome!

We hope someone finds this useful for their own project!

Steve and Jon

Great job, especially with the documentation and all.

How well did it go over in the science fair?

Also, you may want to consider turning this into an instructable. You’ll definitely get questions/suggestions/etc from that place.

Thanks for the comments – I must say, Sparki was one of the most popular entries in the Science Fair! The kids were fascinated by his ability to find his way around the maze. There are so many platforms and tools available to get kids interested and started in technology and Sparki is one of them. Showing kids the connection between code and actually making something come to life is amazing and the kids love it.

No time for an instructable right now, but I think there is enough info here for someone else to learn/build/improve and do their own version!

Here is a really cool Maze Generator that someone could use to build a different maze: mazegenerator.net

The maze find code here should work for any maze if properly constructed.

Cheers!
Steve