For background on pathfinding, look up the A* Algorithm.
something that has never been done before.
Good luck. Do you know how many grad students there have been at MIT and CMU
trying everything and its cousins in regards robotics. Zillions upon zillions.
OTOH, to me, to a large extent robotics bogged down in the 90s, when a lot of people
started using subsumption and really went nowheres. AI-robotics kind of stalled, although
there have been some "minor" advances in the 2000s. For many years, people in robotics
clubs did little more than build line-followers and mini-sumos. At least robot soccer and
robomagellan were a huge step up.
If you're interested in following up robotics in your future education, learn AI and apply it
to robotics. There are too many dumb robots around.