A study on development of home Mess-Cleanup Robot McBot

Autonomous and automatic home Mess-Cleanup Robot (Mcbot) is newly developed in this paper. So far, the vacuum-cleaner had made the burden of house chore lighten but the operational labor of a vacuum-cleaner had been so severe. Recently, the cleaning robot was commercialized to solve home cleaning labor problem but it also was not successful because it still had a problem of mess-cleanup, which was the clean-up of big trash and the arrangement of newspapers, clothes, etc. The cleaning robot just vacuum dust and so small trash but has no function to arrange the mess-up and throw away the big trash in house. For this reason, the market for the cleaning robot is not yet actively built up. So, we develop a new home mess-cleanup robot McBot to perfectly overcome this problem. It needs functions of agile navigation and novel manipulation system for mess-cleanup. The autonomous navigation system has to be controlled for the full scanning of living room and for the precise tracking of the desired path, It must be also able to recognize the absolute position and orientation of the self and to distinguish the mess object to clean-up from obstacle object to just avoid. The manipulator, which is not needed in the vacuum-cleaning robot, has the functions to distinguish big trash to clean from mess objects to arrange, to use its discretion in according to the form of mess objects and to properly carry them to the destination. We use the RFID system to sense them in this paper and propose the new disposition algorithm to have RFID tags installed on the floor and objects indoor. Then, it should be an intelligent system so that the messed-cleanup task can be autonomously performed in a wide variety of situations and environments. It needs to also have an intelligent interaction function for the human-friendly communication. Finally, the good performance of the developed McBot is confirmed through the results of the mess-cleanup experiments.