A Multi-Robotic System for Environmental Cleaning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-robotic cleaning system that uses path planning and team coordination to efficiently clean large industrial environments, outperforming single-robot systems in time efficiency.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel multi-robotic dirt cleaning algorithm with path planning for efficient environmental cleaning in industrial settings.

Findings

Multi-robot system is faster than single robot in cleaning tasks.

The multi-robot system uses similar battery capacity as single robots.

Team-based cleaning improves efficiency without increasing energy consumption.

Abstract

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.