Maze Mapping Robot
Junior Year Robotics Competition
Salma Saleem
Faculty Of Electrical Engineering
Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Science And Technology
Swabi, Pakistan
u2019448@giki.edu.pk
Umar Abdullah
Faculty Of Electrical Engineering
Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Science and Technology
Swabi, Pakistan
u2019520@giki.edu.pk
Usama Pervaiz
Faculty Of Electrical Engineering
Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Science and Technology
Swabi, Pakistan
u2019396@giki.edu.pk
Abstract—This document is about the designing of two robots,
‘Ragnar’ and ‘Flokki’, working as a team, are thrown into a
maze one at a time. Ragnar being the intelligent one, map the
maze. After Ragnar plays its role, Flokki being the quick one,
reach all four edges of the maze by covering the least distance.
Index Terms—Maze mapping, Maze solving, Maze matrix,
Wireless communication, Hardware
I. I NTRODUCTION
Modern robotics technologies are focused on developing
self-navigating autonomous robots to automate our day-to-
day processes. This means that most of the research focuses
on improving sensors and algorithms to build flexible and
accurate robots. In this project I will show you how to build
simple Arduino maze solving and maze mapping robots using
three ultrasonic sensors.This is designed to move in a maze
and escape through it by following its walls. A maze solving
robot is quite similar to a line follower. Like a line follower
has to follow black strip lines, a maze follower finds a wall
and starts following it until it finds an escape route. But unlike
a line follower which has just to follow a predetermined route,
a maze follower is designed to find an escape route that is not
known beforehand. However, both types of robots are designed
to be autonomous, they basically perform different tasks.
II. A PPRATUS
Required components and their quantity is listed as follows;
Robot car chassis - 2
Arduino Uno - 2
L298N Motor Driver - 2
1500 mAh Lithium – Polymer (LiPo) battery - 2
Talha Shahbaz
Faculty Of Electrical Engineering
Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Science And Technology
Swabi, Pakistan
u2019514@giki.edu.pk
Hammad Wasti
Faculty Of Electrical Engineering
Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Science and Technology
Swabi, Pakistan
u2019491@giki.edu.pk
Ultrasonic Sensors - 6
Sensor Brackets - 6
Small Breadboard and jumper wires
III. C ONSTRUCTION AND D ESIGN
The hardware design of the robot is quite similar that of any
other typical line follower robot except that a line follower
may have sensors only in the front side of the robot, the maze
solving robot has sensors at left side, right side and front side
of the robot. The electronic circuitry of the robot consists of
the Arduino board, IR sensor array and L298N motor driver
IC coupled with geared DC motors. The robot is powered by
a 12V battery and is programmed to instantly start finding an
escape route once it is powered by the battery. [1].
A. Circuit Connections
The maze solving robot has to find an escape route by
following walls of the maze. For that, it is equipped with an
Ultra sonic sensor array and a motor driver circuit. Both the
sensor circuit as well the motor driver circuit are interfaced
with the Arduino board. The electronic circuit controlling the
robot has the following building blocks.
B. Components
• Power Supply - In the circuit, Arduino board and Ultra
Sonic sensor array need a 5V regulated DC for their
operation while the motor driver IC needs 12V DC.
A 12V Lipo battery is used as the primary source of
power. The DC motors cannot be directly connected to
 the battery as they can only be controlled by the motor (4). The supply voltage of VCC is +5V and you can attach
driver IC and the motor driver IC itself need a regulated TRIG and ECHO pin to any Digital I/O in your Arduino
power input. Board. [2].
• Arduino UNO – Arduino UNO is one of the most
popular prototyping boards. It is used frequently
in robotic applications as it is small in size and
packed with rich features. The board comes with
built-in Arduino boot loader. It is an Atmega 328
based controller board which has 14 GPIO pins, 6
PWM pins, 6 Analog inputs and on board UART,
SPI and TWI interfaces. In this project, 5 GPIO pins
of the board are utilized to connect the IR sensors
and 6 GPIO pins are used to interface motor driver IC.

C. Assemble Chassis Parts and Ultrasonic Sensor Brackets

Assemble all the chassis parts tightly, using the proper nuts
and bolts. Since the robot moves swiftly, make sure to have
attached the sensor brackets properly and tightly.

D. Attach All Components

Mount all the components on the top face of the robot

• The L298N is a dual H-bridge motor driver integrated
circuit (IC). The Motor drivers act as current ampli-
fiers since they take a low-current control signal and
provide a higher-current signal. This higher current
signal is used to drive the motors. It has 16 pins.
chassis. Then mount the battery pack between the two plates.
The configuration shown below allows you to wire all the
components with the Arduino easily.
E. Wiring

The wiring is quite complex, but diagram is shown below

and understanding each connection will help. This will allow
you to debug your Arduino maze solving robot without much

• DC Motors – In this robot, 12V geared DC motors are

attached to the wheels. Geared DC motors are available
with wide range of RPM and Torque, which allow a robot
to move based on the control signal it receives from the
motor driver IC.
• Ultrasonic Sensor HC-SR04 is a sensor that can measure confusion.
distance. It emits an ultrasound at 40 000 Hz (40kHz)
which travels through the air and if there is an object or
obstacle on its path It will bounce back to the module. F. Interfacing Ultrasonic Sensors to Arduino
Considering the travel time and the speed of the sound
Wire the trigger pin and echo pin of the sensors to ana-
you can calculate the distance. The configuration pin of
log pins of the Arduino. To power up the sensors, con-
HC-SR04 is VCC (1), TRIG (2), ECHO (3), and GND
nect all the ground pins to a common ground rail and
all the 5V pins to a common 5V rail on the breadboard. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Thanks to the lectures and guidance by our courses and
labs instructors and some tutorials and lectures on You-tube.
Because of them we were able grasp the concept of this Junior
Year Robotics Competition.
R EFERENCES
[1] https://maker.pro/arduino/projects/how-to-build-an-arduino-based-maze-
solving-robot
[2] https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/abdularbi17/ultrasonic-sensor-hc-
sr04-with-arduino-tutorial-327ff6
[3] https://www.engineersgarage.com/arduino-based-maze-solving-robot/

Here, the ultrasonic sensors are basically the eyes of the

robot which help it to find any obstacles around it. Ultrasonic
sensors measure the distance to the obstacle for the robot to be
able to navigate autonomously. You can implement your maze
solving robot with just one or two ultrasonic sensors also, but
having three sensors ensures more precise movements.
G. Interfacing the Motor Driver to Arduino
The motor driver has seven screw terminals, which makes
the interfacing easy.The L298N dual H-Bridge motor driver
helps us to control the speed and direction of the two DC
motors simultaneously. It acts as an interface between the
motor and the Arduino. The motor driver has 4 input pins to
control the rotational direction of the motor. ‘Enable A’ and
‘Enable B’ pins have the responsibility to enable and control
the speed of the motors.

IV. H OW THE CIRCUIT WORKS ?

The maze solving robot detects the walls by using the
ultrasonic sensor module and moves the robot close to the
wall, until it finds a no wall region.The sensors allow detecting
side walls and obstacles in front of the robot. When the robot
finds a no wall space on left side i.e. sensors on left side of
the robot detect a no wall region, it turns left and when the
robot finds a no wall space on right side i.e. sensors on right
side of the robot detect a no wall region, it turns right. It keeps
moving along a left side wall or right side wall until it finds an
obstacle in the path or find an escape route. When an obstacle
is detected in front of the robot, it moves away in the opposite
direction until it overcomes the obstacle. As the robot finds
a path by detecting absence of a side wall, it turns in that
direction moving forward to solve the maze. The robot can be
moved forward, backward, left or right by implementing the
input logic at the motor driver pins. [3].