hTetro: Shape Shifting Floor Cleaning Robot

Floor cleaning robot has been studied over the last four decades and hundreds of robot platforms are in the commercial marketplace. However, the performance of such robot are still limited given the highly complex environment that they operate and their fixed morphologies. To this end, we are developing hTetro, a self reconfigurable robot that uses the principle of hinged dissection of polyominoes to transform itself into any of the seven one-sided tetrominoes, the Tetris pieces. The video here demonstrates the superior floor coverage performance of hTetro in comparison to a commercially successful floor cleaning robot. Our hTetro robot equipped with IR and bump sensors is able to map the environment and be able to transform into an optimal morphology to maximize the floor coverage area.