sTetro: A Modular Reconfigurable Staircase Cleaning Robot

Due to faster pace of life in most developed world, floor cleaning is often seen as a dull, dirty, time consuming and tedious chore, giving rise to the development of robotic products for handling the cleaning task. Even though there exists numerous precedence demonstrating the benefits of floor cleaning robots, the conventional robots suffer from a series of performance issues that curtains their full potential. One major factor attributing to their performance loss is their inability to access staircases that form an integral part of every built infrastructure. Considering the crucial role staircases play and their permanent presence even after the advent of lifts and escalators virtually in every multi-story building, the subject of cleaning staircases has received so little attention from roboticists. What we want to achieve is to be able to extend the locomotion capabilities of these robots than it is currently feasible. Particularly, we are developing a new class of cleaning robots that are able to reconfigure between floor and staircase cleaning modes, thereby, maximizing task performance. In terms of design, we have two primary iterations so far. Our sTetro is able to autonomously map its environment using onboard sensors and navigate around the defined floor space to clean the environment efficiently. sTetro has terrain perception capability that detects the type of surface and/or staircase and generates the optimal suction power and sweeping velocity. sTetro's body consists of three cuboids connected with two sliders attached to each side of the middle cuboid. The hollow space within each cuboid encloses the electronics, vacuum suction and sweeping units. The blocks have a modular design, allowing many parts to be reused in the system. A smart application allows user to control the robot to start and stop, navigate to follow a defined trajectory and change operational settings. The reconfiguring mechanisms allows the robot to efficiently clean both flat floor and staircases at one go without any user intervention that is almost impossible for current day cleaning robots.

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Is it available in market ? How to purchase

[@Arturdarbas]

email please.