The design and application of a robotic vacuum cleaner

Abstract

Robots are widely used in modern industrial manufacturing, in households, in entertainment, and in the security sector. To facilitate targeted functions, interactivity in conjunction with high quality sensors play essential roles. In this paper, an intelligent and interactive robotic vacuum cleaner is developed. By using awireless transport protocol (802.11b), the user can monitor the robot's path and remotely manipulate its movements with a pc interface. Research has developed two kinds of functions — an auto-vacuum-cleaning mode and a remote-manipulating mode. For the auto-vacuum-cleaning mode, two pathsearching algorithms are developed — one is the right-side edge-searching and obstacle2 avoiding algorithm, the other is the S-type sweeping and obstacle-avoiding algorithm. Additionally, a system program for plotting the robot's path is developed. By calculating data submitted from a micro controller and an error compensator, the immediate path of a robot is shown on apc monitor. Therefore, further path correction commands can be sent to the robot by the remote-manipulating mode in the main server pc. Consequently, a prototype robot has been manufactured and tested in the laboratory