Research And Development Of Intelligent Cleaning Robot In Public Places

As a forerunner of the practical development of service robots, the cleaning robots have a wide application in helping people to accomplish the cleaning work which is high repetitive and laborious. However, due to the complexity of working environment and the limitation of intelligent level, it remains difficult in autonomous cleaning for public places. Basing on a hand-push sweeper existed, the public cleaning robot system for intelligent cleaning and auto-recharging are designed in this paper. And some key technologies like location and navigation of cleaning robot are also investigated by theory and experiment.Firstly, according to the characteristics of public environment and waste materials, the overall design of intelligent cleaning system is completed, which mainly includes the design of mechanical system, power system, sensing system and control system.Secondly, to minimize the deficiency of the existing indoor location methods for mobile robots, the kinematics model of cleaning robot and RSSI (received signal strength indication) model of WLAN are established. A combined location method for mobile robots based on dead reckoning and WLAN is proposed, which employs PMLA (probability matching location algorithm) and Kalman filter for information fusion. Simulation results reveal that the combined location method works well in improving the positioning accuracy.Then, an intelligent charging navigation system is proposed to realize auto-recharging in large space, which mainly includes the design of docking station and infrared system. A docking strategy combined with long-range navigation and short-range docking is presenred. The artificial potential field method and infrared guidance are applied in the long-range navigation and short-range docking respectively.Finally, the experiment platform of intelligent cleaning robot based on the hand-push sweeper is built. An experiment about the intelligent cleaning and navigation for auto-recharging is conducted to verify the feasibility of this system. The performance of finding a docking station to achieve charging is also analyzed.