Improving robotic vacuum cleaners : Minimising the time needed for complete dust removal

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to examine the cleaning efficiency of an autonomous vacuum cleaner robot; namely, reducing the cleaning time needed in an empty room. To do this we explored how the path planning could be improved upon given access to a dust map that would allow for more sophisticated algorithms depending on the state of the room. The approach we employed in order to compare different preprogrammed path patterns and our own greedy heuristic was to create a simulation environment in Unity3d. In this environment we could create a two dimensional plane to represent the length and width of a room with the size of our choosing. This plane was then subdivided into squared cells that would discretise the environment, which represented the dust map of the room. The tests were conducted in rooms with different dimensions in order to examine how different strategies' efficiency developed in relation to each other. Employing an algorithm like our greedy heuristic after an initial zigzag sweep resulted in a significant improvement in comparison to a robot that is restricted to template patterns only. Future work could involve finding the optimised solution for our heuristic in order to make full use of the dust map and thereby achieve minimal cleaning time for the robot.