Autonomous Self-Reconfigurable Floor Cleaning Robot

The cleaning robots are going through some significant development in recent years, driven by the greater market penetration and the demand for better cleaning performance. However, most of the robots have problems covering the total cleaning area given geometric limitations of the platforms in relation to the cleaning stage, given furniture and architecture. In this paper, we describe the hTrihex platform, which is a self-reconfigurable adaptive robot that attains three different configurations. The change in configuration gives rise to variation in the kinematic model, which in turn changes the behavior of robot locomotion. The change in configuration and the robot position is evaluated using the measurements from the on-board sensors like the encoders, LIDAR, and inertial measuring unit (IMU). These data are then utilized to develop a new cascade control strategy for motion control of h-Trihex. The control cascade comprises of a robust backstepping controller in the outer loop for tackling the varying kinematic and a conventional PID in the inner loop for speed control. This cascade is appended by a PID controller, for correcting the wheel orientation after each configuration change. The proposed design assures asymptotic path tracking and satisfactory closed-loop performance, which are validated through numerical simulations and experiments.