An Autonomous Robot for Children Entertainment

For the Nara Institute of Science Technology’s Open Campus in November 2015, we created an autonomous robot that navigates a small maze looking for kids to stop stealing its yummy candy!

We used a Roomba vacuum cleaner, a lightweight notebook and a Microsoft Kinect to create the robot. The software was implemented in C++ using the Robot Operating System. We implemented SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping), so that the robot could automatically navigate through a maze. We used OpenCV to recognize faces. When the robot detected a face, a loud sound was played and the intruder’s face was shown on a large screen. The robot then chased the intruder.