Twin Brush Floor Polishing Robot

Abstract

A self-propulsive polishing robot is proposed as a method that automates a floor polisher and enables the omni-directional motion of a mobile robot without wheels. The proposed robot is composed of twin rotary brushes and does not require any mechanism such as driving wheels for the locomotion of the robot. When the robot polishes a floor with its brushes rotating, the friction forces occur between the brushes and the floor. The friction forces can be controlled by adjusting the posture of the brushes and it enables the robot to move in any desired direction. In this paper, we present a dynamics model of a brush, which corrects the errors of the currently existing model, and propose a new type of polishing robot, which has the twin brushes rotating in the opposite direction to each other. We also present the dynamics of the proposed robot and found the inverse dynamics solution for the omni-directional motion of the robot: we compute the values of the manipulating variables such as tilting directions and tilting amounts of the brushes for the translational, the rotational, and the combined general motion of the robot.