A novel navigation system for indoor cleaning robot

Abstract

With the development of robotic technology, smart home system becomes more and more popular in metropolitan area. Among all kinds of household devices, cleaning robot has been researched for many years and become a necessary element in smart home system. So far, Commercial cleaning robots for household usage have been available on the market for decades. However, there are still some critical problems remained to be solved, especially the navigation problem. Empirical statistics have revealed that most commercial floor clearing robots don't have a high cleaning efficiency. This phenomenon mainly reflects in two aspects. Firstly, most cleaning robots don't have an efficient mechanism to record its own trajectory. As a result, many cleaning robots clean a certain areas repetitively, which wastes time and lows efficiency. Secondly, most cleaning robot can't perceive the surrounding accurately, so they have problems in obstacle avoidance and route planning. To address the mentioned problem, a novel navigation system for indoor cleaning robot is proposed in this paper. Localization algorithm, stereoscopic vision, wireless network, and human-machine interaction are integrated to promote the working performance of cleaning robot.