Abstract
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.
•A reconfigurable floor cleaning robot, “hTetro”, is developed to overcome the area coverage issues in traditional fixed morphology systems.•hTetro can transform itself into any of the seven one-sided tetrominoes shapes to maximize floor coverage area in constructed buildings•Experiments conducted systematically to benchmark hTetro’s performance with two commercially available fixed morphology robot platforms•The results indicates significant coverage performance with hTetro robot due to its shape-shifting ability in response to its environment