Development of an Autonomous Blower Robot for Cleaning up and Collecting Fallen Leaves

Abstract

The use of household cleaning robots has become increasingly popular, but automation of cleaning up fallen leaves using a blower has not been studied. In this study, we develop an autonomous mobile robot that performs cleaning up leaves with a blower mounted on the robot. We adopt a three-wheel active caster as a moving mechanism: Both the drive and steering axes of each wheel are driven by motors, enabling omnidirectional motion. The blower is fixed to the robot with a slight downward tilt. We evaluated the quantity of leaves cleaned up from a large area varying the speed of movement. We found that the faster the robot moved, the fewer leaves were cleaned up, but at least 98% at the highest speed. We also evaluated the robot's ability to collect leaves using a wall as a guide. As a result, about half of the leaves were missed because the blower was not targeted at the landing place of the flown-up leaves. It turned out that we need to study the three-dimensional behavior of the jet stream for future work.