Abstract
Cleaning is an important factor in most aspects of our day-to-day life. This research work brings a solution to the fundamental question of “How clean is clean” by introducing a novel framework for auditing the cleanliness of built infrastructure using mobile robots. The proposed system presents a strategy for assessing the quality of cleaning in a given area and a novel exploration strategy that facilitates the auditing in a given location by a mobile robot. An audit sensor that works by the “touch and inspect” analogy that assigns an audit score corresponds to its area of inspection has been developed. A vision-based dirt-probability-driven exploration is proposed to empower a mobile robot with an audit sensor on-board to perform auditing tasks effectively. The quality of cleaning is quantified using a dirt density map representing location-wise audit scores, dirt distribution pattern obtained by kernel density estimation, and cleaning benchmark score representing the extent of cleanliness. The framework is realized in an in-house developed audit robot to perform the cleaning audit in indoor and semi-outdoor environments. The proposed method is validated by experiment trials to estimate the cleanliness in five different locations using the developed audit sensor and dirt-probability-driven exploration.
Highlights
The impact of cleaning and cleanliness can span from an individual’s tiny social space to a nation [1]
We propose a novel strategy to assess the extent of cleanliness using an autonomous audit robot
For a vision-based sample auditing approach, the sample audit score can be computed based on the above-mentioned cleanliness determining parameters extracted from the sample image captured by the camera after the dust extraction from the floor
Summary
The impact of cleaning and cleanliness can span from an individual’s tiny social space to a nation [1]. The importance of cleaning acts as a pull factor for the entry of newfangled technologies into the domestic and professional cleaning services, targeting the improvement of the quality and productivity of the cleaning This includes effective disinfection strategies and automation of cleaning process using robots [4,5,6]. An effective method for inspecting the finer details of cleaning quality is essential to assess the cleaning performance of the robot. A visionbased dirt detection method is discussed in [23] for performing selective area coverage by a re-configurable robot. We propose a novel strategy to assess the extent of cleanliness using an autonomous audit robot. The validation of the system through experiment results are given in Section 7, followed by the conclusion of our findings and future work in the Section 8
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