A Development of Home Mess-Cleanup Robot with Entertainment Function

The vacuum-cleaner had made the burden of house chore lighten but the operation labour of a vacuum-cleaner had been so severe. Recently, the cleaning robot was producted to perfectly solve the cleaning labour of a house but it also was not successful because it still had a problem of mess-cleaning, which is the clean-up of big trash and the arrangement of newspapers, clothes, etc. The cleaning robot is to just vacuum dust and small trash and has no function to arrange and take away before the automatic vacuum-cleaning. For this reason, the market for the cleaning robot is not yet built up. So, we need a design method and technological algorithm of new automatic machine to solve the problem of mess-cleanup in house. In this paper, a Home Mess-Cleanup Robot(HMR), which has a practical function of the automatic mess-cleanup, is developed. It need functions of agile automatic navigation, novel manipulation system for mess-cleanup. The automatic navigation system has to be controlled for the full scanning of living room, to recognize the absolute position and orientation of the self, the precise tracking of the desired path, and to distinguish the mess object to clean-up from obstacle object to just avoid. The manipulation system, which is not needed in the vacuum-cleaning robot, must have the functions, how to distinguish big trash to clean from mess objects to arrange, how to grasp in according to the form of mess objects, how to move to the destination in according to mess objects and arrange them. Then, it should be an intelligent system so that the mess cleaning task can be autonomously performed in a wide variety of situations and environments. It need to also has the entertainment functions for the good communication between the human and HMR. Therefore, the Home Mess-cleanup Robot with Entertainmental Human Interface is developed in this paper. Finally, the good performance of the designed machine, HMR'4, is confirmed through the results of the mess clean-up and arrangement.