Crabot: Educational Robot Prototype for Cleaning

The present work deals with the design and construction of an educational indoor cleaner robot: Crabot. The limitations of this robot represent a challenge considering that the task of Crabot is cleaning a room avoiding walls and furniture while it is working. Crabot is a Lego based autonomous mobile robot, which represents the prototype of a real robot for house cleaning, which requires a minimum of intelligence. Crabot is provided with necessary items for floor cleaning such as a small vacuum cleaner and a brush. The control system is based on the subsumption architecture with memory and offers a repertoire of behaviors for navigation and cleaning. This kind of control system allows mixing real-time distributed control with behaviors triggered by robot sensors. The processing is carried out in a pair of Lego RCX microcomputers. Crabot was tested in an artificial world and in competition where its performance was very acceptable