Teaching the Robot to Navigate and Avoid Stairs

Let’s have a quick review of our quest to create a robot that picks up toys. We’ve created a toy detector and trained the robot arm. What’s next on our to-do list? We need to drive the robot to the location of the toy in order to pick it up. That sounds important.

This chapter covers navigation and path planning for our toy-grabbing robot helper. You have to admit that this is one of the most difficult problems in robotics. There are two parts to the task – figuring out where you are (localization), and then figuring out where you want to go (path planning). Most robots at this point would be using some sort of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm that would first map the room, and then figure out where the robot is within it. But is this really necessary? First of all, SLAM generally requires some sort of 3D sensor, which we don’t have, and a lot of processing, which we don’...