Autonomous robot vacuum system composed of a cleaner robot and a dust storage robot

Abstract

In this paper, we address an autonomous robot vacuum system, composed of two robots. Conventional robot vacuum has a small dust bin, and its suction power is low. This low cleaning power has been considered as a defect of a conventional robot vacuum. If we use a large robot vacuum with high cleaning power, then we cannot clear various narrow environments, such as narrow space under a sofa. To resolve this problem, we address an autonomous robot vacuum system composed of a small Cleaner Robot (CR) and a large dust Storage Robot (SR). The CR and the SR are connected using a hose, thus they must maneuver as a pair. The role of the small CR is to clean various environments, such as narrow space under a sofa. The CR is small, thus it cannot contain a large motor for increasing its cleaning power. The dust sucked by the CR is transmitted to the SR through the hose. The SR is large, hence it can have a large motor for increasing its cleaning power compared to a conventional robot vacuum. To the best of our knowledge, our paper is novel in addressing an autonomous robot vacuum system composed of a CR and a SR. Our paper is unique in addressing the path plan of these two connected robots, so that the entire open workspace can be cleaned by the CR as fast as possible. Under MATLAB simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of path planning for our autonomous robot vacuum system. We show that the proposed tethered robots improve the cleaning efficiency, compared to the case where a single large robot vacuum is applied.