Ensuring Area Coverage and Safety of a Reconfigurable Staircase Cleaning Robot

Multistorey buildings are rapidly constructing with the current world development. Cleaning of these buildings is a major concern due to several issues such as scarcity of labor. Cleaning robots are developed to cope with these issues. Among these cleaning robots, staircase cleaning robots play a vital role in a multistorey building. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel control strategy for a reconfigurable staircase cleaning robot to ensure area coverage and safety. A staircase cleaning robot should particularly maintain its orientation parallel to the riser while maintaining a proper clearance with the riser when performing the sideways movement on a thread to ensure safety and coverage. Two Fuzzy Logic Systems (FLSs) have been developed to correct the heading and the clearance distance during sideways movements. Precise measurements on heading error and clearance distance are essential for the decision-making process of the proposed control strategy. Thus, a vision-based perception mechanism has been developed to accurately perceives these essential measurements. The proposal of the control strategy to correct the heading and the clearance distance, and the development of the vision-based perception mechanism are the major contributions of the work. Experiments were conducted by deploying the developed robot in a typical staircase considering different conditions. The experiment results validate that the proposed method can ensure coverage and safety by properly maintaining the heading and clearance of the robot with respect to a riser.