Real Time Measurement of Dirt Pick-up by a Robotic Vacuum Cleaner using Light Sensing Technology

Abstract: Domestic chores are one of the most tedious and time consuming tasks in a person’s life. A lot of time can be saved and put to better use if these tasks can be automated. One such chore is the routine task of vacuuming the house every day. Robotic vacuum cleaners that clean the house are thus one of the most widely used domestic robots. These robots have the ability to clean the entire house almost autonomously with little or no human intervention. However, most of these robots do not have a system to report the real-time pick up of dirt which can be useful to the user in knowing which parts of his house are dirty and maybe investigate the reason behind it. This information can be useful to the robot as well in determining efficient cleaning patterns based on the dirt localization in the house. In this thesis a prototype was developed to measure the real-time pick-up of dirt by a robotic vacuum cleaner. It uses light sensing technology to measure the amount of dirt picked up and can thus be used to glean which parts of the house are dirtier than the others. The signals can also potentially be used to understand the size of the dirt picked up by the robotic vacuum cleaner. Research was done to investigate the different sensing technologies that can be used and to select the appropriate one. The system was tested and conclusions were made regarding its performance. Additional functions that can be implemented and improvements that can be made have also been suggested as future work.