Apologies for the execrable video - it was an old camera, it was dark (heavy gamma correction going on here)... but I thought it time to post something! Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce my little floor-sweeping robot, prototype 1.
At the moment it's rather better at rearranging dust than picking it up - I'd say it's about 50% efficient. It works like those street cleaners - basically a dustpan-and-brush on wheels. It's sensor array is a little crude at the moment, consisting of two bigass bump sensors at the front connected to a bigass 'sensing plate'. It has serious problems with obstacles that taper inwards at the bottom, and since I fitted the dustpan to the bottom it seems to be having a few traction issues, so I guess I need to raise it up a little.
If you look very very carefully on the last part of this clip, you can see a grey smudge on the floor which disappears when the robot goes over it. That's a big pile of dust that I carefully swept up and put in harm's way, so the robot could eat it. Or just throw it around. Whatever.
The trickiest criteria (apart from getting a sensor array which was doable with available components and fairly reliable) was making the whole thing low enough to fit under the sofa. Which it does, just.
Later additions: I wanna put some sort of edge following sensors on the side - got some limit switches and drinking straws for making little 'antenna' feelers. Also really need to smooth out the ride - as you can tell from the clip, it makes a horrendous noise at the moment. Can't be good. I need to somehow improve the ground clearance without losing any cleaning (or dirt-collecting) ability.
But it kinda works. Enough that, once you add in the entertainment value, it's worth running it.
Enormous thanks go to Debbie, who went back and forth to Radio Shack, bought it for me on spec, and packed and posted it! Got the book yet, Debs?
Obviously it needs a better name than 'protoype 1'. Suggestions, anyone?
9 comments:
Again, Multiply has underwatered the audio. How does it do that?
WOW, mother's little helper indeed. How about sweeper1 for now, as there may be modifications.
"Applause" that was really cool! Can you speed it up and infra Tibbles?
Smiles
Wow. You are a Rock Star Engineer Nerd!
Nerd? I can't be a nerd, nerd is bad! Can I be a geek, instead? Geek is good.
(...or so I thought, but according to Wikipedia the opposite is true. Now I'm confused. I thought that 'nerd' more strongly implied lack of social skills, whereas 'geek' implied 'special knowledge in technical area'. But when the definitions are being fought over by large populations of geeks and nerds, who do you trust? I just don't know. And I'm not learning klingon just to find out. Sigh)
Ah, nerds...both descriptions have been used in my time. They used to lack social skills in the 70-80s until the oos when they became sensitive to women's needs, and easy to dominate- hence, most desirable unmanly men
Never asked but where does it collect the dust once it scoops? and won't that clog the motor, is there a filter screen on the bottom?
I was looking for the modifications or a new video, but not seeing it here.
I took some video of the latest incarnation the other night, but the batteries on my camera died in the process so haven't been able to upload it yet. Never fear, it shall be posted imminently!
Since you ask, there is a scoop I made from an old tupperware container - basically a dustpan on the bottom. However, not much dust ever makes it into that. Most of the muck collects on a soft strip of material that I stuck on the bottom of the dustpan to stop it scratching the floor. The motors are sealed units, so I'm not too worried about them clogging; the bit that does clog up is the gear mechanism which feeds the spinning rotors at the front. In a bid to improve the amount of dust I was collecting, I tried changing the setup to a 'combine harvester' sort of arrangement, with one long rotating brush all the way along the front. This collected more dust, but also regularly barfed it out into great big dust bunnies which it scattered randomly around the floor. The latest version has a duster which remains more or less stationary except when the whole thing goes into reverse (to turn away from corners, etc), when it sort of makes a halfhearted effort at scooping the dust back into the pan. The dust still doesn't make it into the pan, but it does seem to be retained, so no more dust bunnies, thankfully. Anyway, all this and more will be revealed soon!
The robot is now called Boris, by the way. I can't even remember why.
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