A Multi-Robotic System for Environmental Cleaning
This addresses cleaning challenges in industrial settings for improved safety and productivity, but it is incremental as it builds on existing robotic cleaning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of cleaning large industrial environments with waste that can harm products and workers by developing a multi-robotic system using iRobot Creates. It results in improved time efficiency compared to a single robot system, with similar battery usage and cleaning efficiency.
There is a lot of waste in an industrial environment 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 automative cleaning robots could be used, the environment is often too big 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 system algorithm for multiple automatic iRobot Creates teaming to efficiently clean an environment. Moreover, 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 spending more time 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.