Floor cleaning robot with reconfigurable mechanism

Although several precedents have demonstrated the benefits of using floor cleaning robots for the maintenance of constructed buildings, traditional platforms suffer from a series of performance issues. One major factor that contributes to their performance deficit is their fixed morphology design, which highly constrains their navigation and access. To this end, a novel Tetris-inspired reconfigurable floor cleaning robot called hTetro is presented in this paper. The developed robot is capable of reconfiguring its morphology to any of seven one-sided tetrominoes in response to its perceived environment to maximize its coverage area. This paper presents the coverage area performance of the hTetro robot and systematically benchmarks its performance with two commercially available fixed morphology robot platforms. Our experiments indicate that hTetro achieves significantly higher coverage performance than the other platforms due to its shape-shifting ability in response to navigating its environment.