automatic vaccum cleaner

[headcracker]

friends.....

i came up with an idea of an automatic vaccum cleaner which wud clean up the entire surface of the floor.
the thing that is worrying me is how to encounter the obstacles in the room. i mean the furnishers n all.
i thought of using a webcam that wud acquire the image of the room and using a pc interface, it wud calculate an optimum path and feed it to the device which wud perform the cleaning
but i am not so clear with the concepts of acquiring n processing images (image processing). is there any other thing i can use to acquire the image of the room.

is there any such project done by any 1 here. plz help .

 

[dknguyen]

I haven't seen a homemade one mainly because it's so hard to find an effective vacuum cleaner unit that runs off of a battery with the mechanical wipers and everything.

Just use sonar or something for object detection and have it sort of randomize it's motion... The expense and complexity of image processing hardware and software is beyond the reach and knowledge of most people. Coding for path planning is also out of reach of most people.

If you do not have about even the basic concepts of image processing or path planning, then it's way out of your league. Even if you do it's really challenging. It's not the kind of thing that you learn as a subproject. It's the kind of thing that is a mega-project.

Best way right now is to intelligently randomize the motion of the robot in an intelligent way for full coverage and use sonar for object detection.

Let me try and demonstrate why:
1. Suppose I took the easiest method and provided an overhead photo of the room to the robot. How would I even start to pick out what's an object and what is not? It's a cluttered up, non-picture perfect photo that I have to process. Overhead photos are also kind of hard to get.

2. Okay, so providing with an overhead photo is already pretty hard in the first place. Suppose I was able to achieve 1, how then would I path plan? How would I even begin to figure out the best way to walk about? Remember, you have to think of how to do this at an extremely low level.

3. The next step is that the robot has to know exactly where it is in the room to know where it is on the map. . How did you plan to do this? Odometry has too much error. And if you provided overhead video feed the robot would have to be able to pick itself out in the video. Not the easiest thing in the world to do. You could also provide an indoors GPS system with high accuracy. This gets limited by walls and how you may have to setup the room and calibrate it before you start the system, plus you need several "satellites". Using radio is beyond your means so the only option is to use light & sound time differences in travel which requires line of sight. Not useful for a low level robot. Of course, you also have something like this:
**broken link removed**
which projects a light map onto the ceiling from a base station and the robot reads the light patterns to find out where it is in the room- not something you can build yourself as it kind of involves some kind of vision processing.

3. Now what you seem to want is to use a webcam to provide an single isosymmetric view or first person video of the room. Both of these require the the ability to recognize when the floor is the floor and when an object is an object as well as when the floor is the floor behind an object. With first-person video, you would have to be able to recognize that an object from one photo is in fact the same object as in a bunch of other photos, each at a different angle and then discern it's depth and map it onto a map. This is leading edge research. It's already hard enough for a robot to know when something is in front of it, let alone higher processing functions with video.

Use an intelligently randomized path and regular obstacle avoidance sonar and IR to do the job.

 

[headcracker]

thanks a lot friend

well i don;t know whether v'll be able to do it or not but definitely its worth trying
thanks for taking so much efforts. it is of gr8 help to a newbie like me

 

[dknguyen]

I'd first try to find the vacuum cleaner part. That's the biggest starting pain. YOU can build a vacuum robot without vision, but not without a vacuum. Building a randomized, sonar vacuum robot should be entirely within your powers, if you can find a good-battery powered vacuum unit (I haven't been able to). You could always buy a roomba and stick your own computer inside.

 

[philba]

google roomba - lots of hacks. sparkfun has some adaptors. one for bluetooth rf control of the roomba. sit in your ezboy and drive the vacuum cleaner around the house.

 

[JFDuval]

I haven't seen a homemade one mainly because it's so hard to find an effective vacuum cleaner unit that runs off of a battery with the mechanical wipers and everything.

Hello!

In fact, it's possible for a hobbyist to build a vacuum cleaner robot. I'm working on building one since last year (not constently). You can see me first prototype here (quite ugly!): **broken link removed**

The second (functionnal): **broken link removed**

And the first pictures of the third one (still in construction): **broken link removed**

 

[dknguyen]

How did you make the vacuum mechanism?

 

[headcracker]

hey........wat kind of sensors u used for identying the walls n the furnisher in the room

i mean can i get to c ur design.....

dunno french, so can;t understand the stuff u gave on the link

can u help me....

 

[dknguyen]

S/he used infrared emitters and detectors to detect objects. However, s/he built them from scratch and it appears they are proximity detectors (too close/not too close) rather than ranging. You can get prebuilt ranging IR sensors. The sharp ones are the most popular and come in various minimum and maximum ranges, as well as digital and analog output, and some of them are proximity detectors rather than rangefinders. You can get them from many sources, but this website just happens to have most of them listed all in one place.

Sharp GP2_ _ _ _ IR Rangers:
https://www.acroname.com/robotics/parts/c_Sensors.html

The proximity detector's advantage over the rangefinders is that it is effective to 0 cm, where the rangefinders are "blind" if an object is below within their minimum range. However, the proximity detector does not give you a range reading, rather it just tells you if something is within, for example, 10cm of the sensor's field of view.

 

[JFDuval]

Hello!

It's "he" .

The vaccum: the harness (or impeller? not sur of the word, the round thing that suck air) is from an old vacuum cleaner. The motor is from an old RC car. It takes 5A@12V to run. Power come from a 12V@3300mAh modelism pack.

For the sensors: in ASAv2, yeah, it's built from scratch. In ASAv3 I use two GP2D12(IR) and one SRF04(US). The two Sharp's ones are 10cm inside the bot so I can see at 0cm in front of the bot.

Fell free to ask any question,

 

[dknguyen]

What kind of old vacuum cleaner? A battery-powered dustbuster? Not like a 120VAC vacuum right?

 

[headcracker]

hey friends
it sounds gr8 n quite similar to wat v have thought
can u guys tell me if i can use ultra sound for detecting objects
i mean which wud be better IR or ultra sound ?
better in all sense...as in cost, reliabilty, life, accuracy etc.

 

[dknguyen]

Use both. IR has a hard time seeing black objects which reflect little light and sonar has a hard time seeing soft objects that absorb sound better than they reflect. It's pretty hard to detect a soft black object. Within the "feasible" price range, sonar has the longest range and its more accurate the triangulation-type IR sensors (the time-of-flight light sensors are VERY expensive). But sonar's effectiveness (accuaracy and maximum range) is greatly reduced in wind and really weird temperatures.

And sonar has the largest maximum range to minimum range ratio compared to triangulation type IR sensors (they have the best close-range long-range tradeoff). If I had to go with just one for a indoor robot, I would go sonar since a contact switch could always be used to detect the soft objects that the sonar can't detect, and running into a soft object is not so bad as running into a black and possibly hard object. Sonar does cost a little bit more than the Sharp IR sensors depending on which sonar you choose to go with.

Sonar usually has a wider beam width than IR which may or may not be what you want.

The reasonable price range I said earlier is pretty much under $500-$1000, but all the devices I am referring to are $10-20 for the IR sensors, $25-50 for the "regular" sonar, and $135 for the narrow1-beam sonar. So the options within the feasible price range are pretty much all on the low end.

 

[catcat]

You can use bumpers with pushbuttons in them, ultrasonic sensors, or infrared (emit infrared and sense the intensity of the reflection)

 

[thin_master]

We have done a similar project. A robot that finds its way in a maze. But we used ultrasonic sensors to detect walls. You may try that.

 

[Norlin]

As someone previously mentioned
https://www.irobot.com/
Have you checked it out?

 

[headcracker]

hey friends

pleased to infrom u that v have completed the project . v r thinking of making lot more improvements, but as for the syllabus it stands a complete project.
Rgt now busy with exams, so cannot post much details aboiut the thing. But after all is done, i;ll definitely post the details of the entire project.

Thanks every1 once again.

 

[3v0]

google roomba - lots of hacks. sparkfun has some adaptors. one for bluetooth rf control of the roomba. sit in your ezboy and drive the vacuum cleaner around the house.

From what I understand it is a bit of a stretch to call the rooba a vacuum cleaner. More like a floor or carpet sweep.