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Vacuum Cleaning Robots
This project is no longer active.
Head: Howie Choset
Contact: Howie Choset (choset@cs.cmu.edu)
Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Associated lab/group: Biorobotics
It sucks. It is the dream robot application. Conventional robot vacuum cleaners move randomly about their floor space yielding inefficient solutions and displeasing patterns on the floor. Alternative solutions require offline programming which is tedious to the experienced programmer and impossible for the most astute layman, let alone your grandmother. We are applying our coverage path planning technology to robotic vacuum cleaning; the robot need not require any prior information about the floor space, yet our algorithms will direct the robot to completely cover the floor space without user input, user direction, or any form of programming. To fully accomplish this application, we are building an inexpensive mobile robot vacuum platform; the challenge here is to build a no-frills mobile robot that accomplishes our task but at 1/10th the cost of conventional mobile robots.