A Multi-Robotic System for Environmental Dirt Cleaning

An industrial environment usually has a lot of waste that could cause harmful effects to both the products and the workers resulting in product defects, itchy eyes or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, etc. While automatic cleaning robots could be used, the environment is often too large for one robot to clean alone in addition to the fact that it does not have adequate stored dirt capacity. We present a multi-robotic dirt cleaning algorithm for coordinating multiple iRobot-Creates as a team to efficiently clean an environment. Often, since some spaces in the environment are clean while others are dirty, our multi-robotic system possesses a path planning algorithm to allow the robot team to clean efficiently by increasing vacuum motor power on the area with higher dirt level. Overall, our multi-robotic system outperforms the single robot system in time efficiency while having almost the same total battery usage and cleaning efficiency result. The project source codes is available on our ARA lab's github: https://github.com/aralab-unr/multi-robot-cleaning.