Automatic cable spooling for a robotic vacuum cleaner

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to create a mechanism that can automatically gather and loosen the power line on the mobile cleaning robot. A single-chip Microcontroller PIC18F452 is used as a control core in the robot. The robot driven by two stepping motors is equipped with six infrared-ray-distance detectors to detect obstacles and calculate the real distance between the sensor and obstacles. Moreover, a cable rewinding/loosening controller with a three-directional tension detecting switch is used to detect the appropriate rewinding/loosening. A cable-tray used to gather the cable is driven by a DC motor. The electric power of the robot is supplied by four sets of 12 v Pb-made batteries. The vacuum cleaning robot's plug-in action will be performed after the edge-searching is completed. The sweeping mode is started up and a s-type sweeping path is executed. The cable will be adjusted by using the cable rewinding/loosening controller during the vacuumcleaning process. The robot will rewind the cable while moving back to the wall socket if the ground-cleaning is completed. Experimental results reveal that the robot can rewind and loosen the cable effectively during the vacuum-cleaning process.