Maze Solving with humanoid robot NAO using Real-Time object detection

In a future that is not too distant from today, humanoids are surely going to be an integral part of both our professional and private lives, assisting us with various tasks. Unlike normal robots that we may encounter in our everyday lives, humanoids are designed in specific manners to give them more human-like capabilities that enable them to perform complex tasks such as climbing a flight of stairs. In this paper, we present a Maze-Solving Algorithm which is a software developed specifically for the humanoid robot, NAO, and gives it the capability to enter and exit a maze autonomously. NAO is a next-gen humanoid bot developed by SoftBank Robotics using the power of AI. The bot is equipped with numerous sensors and cameras. Though various quantitative approaches were considered and experimented with, we stuck onto the one which had the least average time complexity of all after a thorough comparative study. We suggest an approach where the humanoid can detect and localize objects from a distance and take programmable decisions based on them. AI constantly tries to give robots human-thinking capabilities to make their decision-making skills similar to those of humans, if not better than them. This algorithm was developed taking into consideration how a human intellect would react rationally if he is stuck in a maze. The methodology used revolves primarily around the combined use of SONAR(Sound navigation ranging) and tactical sensors, and cameras equipped within the bot. The output values from this hardware were then evaluated to judge the distance from a wall and the reactions from the bot were calculated by the suggested algorithm accordingly.