Robot Cleaner Path Planning to Minimize Low-Height Obstacle Climbing
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Solution Overview
Problem
Robot cleaners face challenges when navigating low-height obstacles such as thresholds, carpets, or mats, as they often repeatedly climb and descend these obstacles, leading to restraint issues and inefficient cleaning.
Innovation Solution
A method and system for a robot cleaner that determines whether to climb an obstacle, stores its boundary position, and adjusts its travel path to minimize climbing low-height obstacles, allowing it to clean the area effectively while avoiding repeated interactions with these obstacles.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If the robot cleaner climbs low-height obstacles during cleaning, then it can clean areas on both sides of the obstacle, but it repeatedly travels up and down the obstacle causing restraint and inefficiency
Solution Approach 1:
The robot cleaner performs mapping and identifies obstacle positions before starting the cleaning process. By preliminarily recognizing the cleaning area and obstacle locations, the robot can plan its cleaning path to minimize repeated climbing of the same obstacles, thereby improving cleaning efficiency while reducing time spent traveling up and down obstacles.
2Loss of time
If the robot cleaner avoids climbing low-height obstacles, then it reduces restraint and travel time, but it cannot clean the area on the other side of the obstacle
Solution Approach 1:
The robot cleaner performs mapping before cleaning to preliminarily identify the cleaning area and obstacle positions. This preliminary recognition allows the robot to plan a cleaning strategy that minimizes repeated obstacle climbing while ensuring complete cleaning coverage. The robot can determine the optimal timing and path for necessary obstacle crossings based on the pre-acquired spatial information.
3Measurement precision
If the robot cleaner uses sensors to detect obstacles, then it can identify obstacle positions, but sensor misdetection occurs at low-height obstacles
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines multiple sensor types including cliff sensors, obstacle sensors, and ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles. By merging the detection capabilities of different sensors, the system compensates for the limitations of individual sensors, particularly improving detection reliability for low-height obstacles that may be missed by single-sensor systems.
Data Source
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AI summary
Disclosed are a robot cleaner and a method for controlling the same in which, when there is a climbable low height obstacle such as a threshold, a carpet, or the like in a cleaning area when the robot cleaner travels the cleaning area, the robot cleaner is able to climb the obstacle after completing a travel of a region except for the corresponding obstacle.