61 Results Found

Steam mopping is an eco-friendly solution for cleaning and disinfecting floors, avoiding harsh chemicals or harmful UV lights. Currently, commercial steam mopping systems are manually operated, which is laborious and unsafe. This work presents the de...

Vibration is an indicator of performance degradation or operational safety issues of mobile cleaning robots. Therefore, predicting the source of vibration at an early stage will help to avoid functional losses and hazardous operational environments....

Cleaning is an important factor in most aspects of our day-to-day life. This research work brings a solution to the fundamental question of “How clean is clean” by introducing a novel framework for auditing the cleanliness of built infrastructure usi...

Fouling organisms reduce a ship’s fuel efficiency and disturb the ecosystem. Therefore, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and many nations have enacted laws that mandate periodic hull cleaning for removing fouling organisms. However...

In recent years, more attention has been paid to water surface environment protection. Current water surface waste cleaning mainly relies on manual operations, which are low-efficiency and dangerous. Therefore, in this paper, we design a fully autono...

In this paper, a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based approach for learning mobile cleaning robot navigation commands that leverage experience from expert demonstrations is presented. First, expert demonstrations of robot motion trajectories in si...

Visual methods have many applications in mobile robotics problems, such as localization, navigation, and mapping. Some methods require that the robot moves in a plane without tilting. This planar-motion assumption simplifies the problem, and can lead...

In recent years, cleaning robots like Roomba have gained popularity. These cleaning robots have limited battery power, and therefore, efficient cleaning is important. Efforts are being undertaken to improve the efficiency of cleaning robots. Most of...

With global warming, the cultivation area of bermudagrass is moving northwards in the Mediterranean area despite its winter dormancy and loss of green color. The most common solution is overseeding with perennial ryegrass, which can be complicated to...

During a viral outbreak, such as COVID-19, autonomously operated robots are in high demand. Robots effectively improve the environmental concerns of contaminated surfaces in public spaces, such as airports, public transport areas and hospitals, that...

The demand for renewable energy sources is growing fast because of the negative impact of the utilization of fossil energy, nuclear energy, and hydroelectricity. One of the renewable energy sources, known as solar energy, which uses the photovoltaic...

Debris detection and classification is an essential function for autonomous floor-cleaning robots. It enables floor-cleaning robots to identify and avoid hard-to-clean debris, specifically large liquid spillage debris. This paper proposes a debris-de...

Cleaning is one of the fundamental tasks with prime importance given in our day-to-day life. Moreover, the importance of cleaning drives the research efforts towards bringing leading edge technologies, including robotics, into the cleaning domain. Ho...

Regular washing of public pavements is necessary to ensure that the public environment is sanitary for social activities. This is a challenge for autonomous cleaning robots, as they must adapt to the environment with varying pavement widths while avo...

Several robot-related studies have been conducted in recent years; however, studies on the autonomous travel of small mobile robots in small spaces are lacking. In this study, we investigate the development of autonomous travel for small robots that...

Cleaning operations in narrow pipelines are often hindered by limited maneuverability and low efficiency, necessitating the development of a high-performance and highly adaptable robotic solution. To address this challenge, this study proposes a pipe...

Robotics is a highly developed field in industry, and there is a large research effort in terms of humanoid robotics, including the development of multi-functional empathetic robots as human companions. An important function of a robot is to find an...

Floor-cleaning robots are primarily designed to clean on a single floor, while multi-floor environments are usually not considered target applications. However, it is more efficient to have an autonomous floor-cleaning robot that can climb stairs and...

Autonomous mobile robots have recently become a popular solution for automating cleaning tasks. In one application, the robot cleans a floor space by traversing and covering it completely. While fulfilling its task, such a robot may create a map of i...

Hazardous object detection (escalators, stairs, glass doors, etc.) and avoidance are critical functional safety modules for autonomous mobile cleaning robots. Conventional object detectors have less accuracy for detecting low-feature hazardous object...

Recent advancements in autonomous mobile robots have led to significant progress in area coverage tasks. However, challenges persist in optimizing the efficiency and computational complexity of complete coverage path planner (CCPP) algorithms for mul...

Efficient task co-ordination is an important problem in multirobot systems. The explicit programming of each robot to perform specific tasks (e.g., cleaning) is too cumbersome and inefficient, as the areas to serve in a map may vary with time. Moreov...

This paper describes the design and development of a cleaning robot, using adaptive manufacturing technology and its use with a control algorithm for which there is a stability proof. The authors’ goal was to fill the gap between theory and practical...

Robot-aided cleaning auditing is pioneering research that uses autonomous robots to assess a region’s cleanliness level by analyzing the dirt samples collected from various locations. Since the dirt sample gathering process is more challenging,...

Staircase cleaning is a crucial and time-consuming task for maintenance of multistory apartments and commercial buildings. There are many commercially available autonomous cleaning robots in the market for building maintenance, but few of them are de...

Tiling robots with fixed morphology face major challenges in terms of covering the cleaning area and generating the optimal trajectory during navigation. Developing a self-reconfigurable autonomous robot is a probable solution to these issues, as it...

Autonomous mobile cleaning robots are ubiquitous today and have a vast market need. Current studies are mainly focused on autonomous cleaning performances, and there exists a research gap on monitoring the robot’s health and safety. Vibration i...

As marine plastic pollution threatens the marine ecosystem seriously, the government needs to find an effective way to clean marine plastics. Due to the advantages of easy operation and high efficiency, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have been...

Human behaviour demonstrates environmental awareness and self-awareness which is used to arrive at decisions and actions or reach conclusions based on reasoning and inference. Environmental awareness and self-awareness are traits which autonomous rob...

Due to the particularity of the jacket structure of offshore platforms and the complexity of the marine environment, there have been few effective localization and autonomous control methods for underwater robots that are designed for cleaning tasks....

This study introduces a novel robotic control paradigm, “chaos redirection,” which utilizes a single chaotic Hopfield Neural Network (HNN). We introduce “false attractors” synthetic trajectories created by applying controlled...

Domestic chimney cleaning is still mostly a manual procedure which can be overly complex, dangerous, and expansive. This paper describes the design of a novel robotic device for chimney cleaning that aims to provide a valuable alternative solution to...

The efficiency of energy usage applied to robots that implement autonomous duties such as floor cleaning depends crucially on the adopted path planning strategies. Energy-aware for complete coverage path planning (CCPP) in the reconfigurable robots r...

A wall-climbing robot is an electromechanical device capable of autonomous or semi-autonomous movement on intricate vertical surfaces (e.g., walls, glass facades, pipelines, ceilings, etc.), typically incorporating sensing and adaptive control system...

Corner cleaning is the most important manufacturing step of window framing to ensure aesthetic quality. After the welding process, the current methods to clean the welding seams lack quality control and adaptability. This increases rework, cost, and...

This paper explores the application of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Sim2Real strategies to enhance the autonomy of beach-cleaning robots. Experiments demonstrate that DRL agents, initially refined in simulations, effectively transfer their n...

The autonomous floor-cleaning self-reconfigurable robots have entered into the practical stage by establishing enhanced area coverage over the fixed morphology counterparts. Energy consumption during the self-reconfiguration, i.e., changing the shape...

What do we need for sustainable artificial intelligence that is not harmful but beneficial human life? This paper builds up the interaction model between direct and autonomous learning from the human’s cognitive learning process and firms’ open innov...

This paper presents a machine learning (ML)-based approach for the intelligent control of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) utilized in solar panel cleaning systems, aiming to mitigate challenges arising from uncertainties, disturbances, and dynamic environm...

The autonomous navigation of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in unstructured environments, such as agricultural or forestry settings, has been the subject of extensive research by various investigators. The navigation capability of a UGV in unstructu...

Area coverage is a crucial factor for a robot intended for applications such as floor cleaning, disinfection, and inspection. Robots with fixed shapes could not realize an adequate level of area coverage performance. Reconfigurable robots have been i...

Pavement in outdoor settings is an unstructured environment with sharp corners, varying widths, and pedestrian activity that poses navigation challenges while cleaning for autonomous systems. In this work, an approach towards navigating without colli...

Clean water security demands autonomous systems that sense, reason, and act at scale. We introduce AquaSurveil, a unified multi-agent platform coupling mobile robots, fixed IoT nodes, and privacy-preserving machine learning for continent-scale water...

The cleaning and maintenance of large-scale façades is a high-risk industry. Although existing wall-climbing robots can replace humans who work on façade surfaces, it is difficult for them to operate on façade protrusions due to...

Floor-cleaning robots are becoming increasingly more sophisticated over time and with the addition of digital cameras supported by a robust vision system they become more autonomous, both in terms of their navigation skills but also in their capabili...

In the face of today’s ever-evolving global health landscape and ambient assisted living (AAL), marked by the persistent emergence of novel viruses and diseases that impact vulnerable categories and individual safety, the need for innovative di...

Forest fires have become increasingly prevalent and devastating in many regions worldwide, posing significant threats to biodiversity, ecosystems, human settlements, and the economy. The United States (USA) and Portugal are two countries that have ex...

Autonomous beach-cleaning robots require reliable, low-cost navigation on sand. We study Sim-to-Real transfer of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies using a minimal sensor suite—wheel-encoder odometry and a single 2-D LiDAR—on a 30...

The efficiency of autonomous systems that tackle tasks such as home cleaning, agriculture harvesting, and mineral mining depends heavily on the adopted area coverage strategy. Extensive navigation strategies have been studied and developed, but few f...

As autonomous tiling devices begin to perform floor cleaning, agriculture harvesting, surface painting tasks, with minimal or no human intervention, a new challenge arises: these devices also need to be energy efficient and be constantly aware of the...