Vacuum Cleaner Robot with Staircase Cleaning Feature and Boustrophedon Path Planning

Home automation technology is rising and growing in demand, one of the devices being actively developed and highly sought is a vacuum cleaner robot. Products available today has many features, but none has the ability to clean on different leveled surface area or multistory house. This research develops a vacuum cleaner robot that is capable of cleaning open-space area using boustrophedon path planning and has the ability to completely clean staircase area. Arduino Mega 2560 is used as the main processor, with timing belt system to move a platform as the climbing mechanism. The robot uses mecanum wheels, enabling the robot to move in all directions within a tight space. Step up test will be conducted in 2 phases, first the robot will climb a box with varying height from 5-25cm with 5cm increments, repeated 10 times for each different height. The second phase tests the robot on a staircase for 20 repetitions, to examine its ability in completely covering a staircase. The result is the robot successfully climbs to the height of 20cm with 100% success rate and fails at 25cm, it also achieves 80% success rate on staircase complete area coverage test. The boustrophedon path-planning test is conducted using an unobstructed, walled, 120x120cm open-space arena, marked with 30x30cm grid. The robot is tested by placing it at 4 different initial position, repeated 10 times for each to test its ability to find the nearest corner, and then, using the same arena, make the robot cover it completely using boustrophedon path planning. This results in 100% success rate in finding the nearest corner and 85% success rate for complete area coverage. Vacuum cleaning ability is then tested by having the robot clean traces of flour and salt, representing very fine and small particles of dirt, but due to a bad design for the dust collection tunnel, the vacuum suction power is very weak and this results in failure to completely clean both substances.