A Floor Cleaning Robot for Domestic Environments

Abstract

Although a number of cleaning machines have made its way into the market, cleaning robot in the context of domestic floor environments with different types of dust and dynamic obstacles is still a challenge. This paper presents a mobile robot with sweeping, vacuum suction and wiping capacity for effective cleaning of a domestic floor. The robot can avoid collisions with dynamic obstacles through the fusion of information from two sensors: a sharp infra red sensor and an ultrasonic sonar sensor. It can be used in both autonomous and manual mode of operations. In the autonomous mode, the robot moves in a zig-zag pattern following an edge detection algorithm. It can be controlled using an Android application in the manual mode of operation. In the experimental set-up, cleaning efficiencies of 85% and 92% have been obtained in the autonomous and manual modes respectively. It can clean the floor closer to the wall upto an average distance of ≈16 cm at a cleaning rate of ≈180 cm2/sec.