Path finding for a NAO humanoid robot by fusing visual and proximity sensors

Humanoid robot path finding is one of the core-technologies in robot research domain. This paper presents an approach to finding a path for robot motion by fusing images taken by the NAO's camera and proximity information delivered by sonar sensors. The NAO robot takes an image around its surroundings, uses the fuzzy color extractor to segment its potential path colors, and selects a fitting line as path by the least squares method. Therefore, the NAO robot is able to perform the automatic navigation according to the selected path. As a result, the experiments are conducted to navigate the NAO robot to walk to a given destination and to grasp a box. In addition, the NAO robot uses its sonar sensors to detect a barrier and helps pick up the box with its hands.