Camera-Guided Pool Cleaner Control for Complete Surface Coverage
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Solution Overview
Problem
Automated robotic pool cleaners face challenges in effectively controlling and monitoring their operation to ensure thorough cleaning of all pool surfaces, making manual cleaning tedious and inefficient.
Innovation Solution
A pool cleaning system equipped with a self-propelled cleaner, rotatably-mounted supports, a filter, an electric motor, cameras for surface imaging, and a controller that generates control signals to direct the cleaner's movement based on cleanliness characteristics, along with a portable device for graphical representation of cleaned and unclean areas, facilitating efficient and thorough pool surface cleaning.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If automated robotic pool cleaners are used to clean pool surfaces, then cleaning efficiency is improved and manual effort is reduced, but control and monitoring capability deteriorates making it difficult to ensure thorough cleaning of all pool surfaces
Solution Approach 1:
The system incorporates cameras that capture images of the pool surface during cleaning operations. These images are transmitted to a remote device where image processing algorithms analyze the cleanliness of different pool areas. Based on this feedback, the controller automatically adjusts the cleaner's path to revisit and re-clean areas that are still dirty, ensuring thorough cleaning while maintaining automated operation.
Solution Approach 2:
The robotic cleaner is equipped with onboard cameras and processing capabilities that enable it to autonomously monitor its own cleaning performance. The system automatically identifies uncleaned areas and redirects itself to clean those areas without human intervention, making the monitoring and control functions self-service rather than requiring manual oversight.
2Reliability
If the cleaner traverses the pool surface multiple times to ensure thorough cleaning, then cleaning completeness is improved, but time consumption increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary assessment of the pool surface condition using cameras before beginning the cleaning process. It creates a map of dirty areas and plans an optimized cleaning path that covers all necessary areas in a single pass when possible. This preliminary action prevents unnecessary repeated traversals while ensuring complete coverage of all dirty areas.
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses image processing to identify only the specific portions of the pool surface that require cleaning, rather than cleaning the entire surface uniformly. By focusing cleaning efforts only on dirty areas detected by the cameras, the system achieves complete cleaning of necessary areas without wasting time on already clean portions, thus reducing overall time consumption.
Data Source
AI summary
A pool cleaning system for cleaning debris from a submerged surface of a swimming pool includes a self-propelled pool cleaner having rotatably-mounted supports for supporting and guiding the cleaner on the pool surface; an electric motor for enabling the rotation of the rotatably-mounted supports on the pool surface; at least one camera to capture imagery of the pool surface; a controller, in electronic communication with the at least one camera, to determine a cleanliness characteristic of the pool surface on which the cleaner has passed based on the camera imagery and generate a control signal to direct movement of the cleaner based on the cleanliness characteristic of the pool surface, and a portable electronic device configured to present a graphic on a display, the graphic depicting the submerged surface of the pool and those portions of the surface that remain uncleaned as the cleaner traverses the pool surface.