Robot Vacuum Cleaner

Hello everybody!

I have been working on a robot vacuumcleaner for a while now and i would like to share it with you. This project is my experience with robots but i am already thinking of new robot projects for the future.

My first idea was to make a little animal like robot pet but after seeing a robot vacuumcleaner in action for the first time i changed my plans. A robot vacuum cleaner seemed a bit more usefull than a robot pet which would probalye end up sitting on a shelf in my room. 

The robot is made out of lasercut MDF and PMMA. The wheels and gearboxes are from Dagu. I took apart a small RC car for some motors and an H-Brigde. It has five motors; 2 for the wheels, 2 for the bristles, and one for the vacuumpump.

The assembly of al the parst whent pretty smoot,there is just enough space to cram al the electronics in so the wirering is a bit of a mess but im satisfied. 

In the rear end of the robot you can see a small container with a transparant lid on it, this is where the dust is collected. there is a littlebit of filter media which keeps the dust from blowing back out. you can also see the fan next to the dust container. Next to the right wheel there is a motor that drives the front sweeper via a pully. you can see the arduino and H-bridge in the front of the robot. and the battery's of course.

This is a picture of the underside of the robot. you can see the bristles here. the dustpan scrapes over the floor when the robot is right side up. the vacuumpump draws air over the dustpan collecting all dustparticels. The small red button is the on/of switch.

In this picture you can see the motor and pully that drive the bristle. A scewer is used as an axle.

Another picture with the dust bin removed.

I have done some tests and the mechanics work very well, at first i had some problems with the front sweeper. I was spinning very vast and the wind from the britles blowed all the dust out of the way instead of sweeping it right into the second bristle. I have over come the problem by using a pully to slow it down.the vacuumpump works well and is strong enough to suck the dust right into the dust container.

As i was trying to program i ran into a problem. erverytime i uploaded a sketch to my arduino an removed the USB cable, my arduino seemed to have forgotten the sketch when it as powerd on by the battery's via the other plug. My arduino would power up but even the simple blink program would nog run. I did some research and found this article which describes a similar problem: http://blog.arduino.cc/2011/01/20/issues-with-the-new-arduino-uno-smd-edition/

Weird thing was that whenever i used the USB port to power the arduino the sketch would run just fine. I cut up a USB cable with the right connector and hooked it up to the battery's and now it seems to work. I have absoluteley no clue why it wont work with  maybe one of you guys can enlight me on what is wrong.

Currently i am working on programming the robot which is quite a challange for me, the closest thing to programming that i had ever done was setting an alarmclock. But i really like doing it!

Thats it for now! more will come soon.