Abstract
In the past two decades, robotics have invested tremendous research effort to deploy long-term autonomous robots to ensure a smart hygienic manufacturing environment in the food and drink industry and translated such attempts into successful robotic products. However, most such systems were developed with fixed morphological design, which highly constrains their navigation and access in constraint spaces. To this end, we have developed hTetro, Tetris-inspired self-reconfigurable floor-sweeping system capable of performing autonomously in a constrained environment for an extended period to maximize the cleaning area. This paper presents the hTetro robot’s improved system design, control system, and autonomous coverage strategy that supports achieving long-term deployment. We validated the performance of the proposed system by conducting trials in a complex food court environment as our case study. Our trials at SUTD Lab, SUTD Singapore canteen, and Tampines Singapore food center are divided into three phases from Jan 2020 until the end of Sep 2020. We tracked the robot’s movement every day during each trial while cleaning to generate the coverage map, which helps compute the total area covered. Also, we systematically benchmarked the robot’s coverage performance with a commercially available fixed morphology robot cleaning robot in the same environment. To our best knowledge, this is the first time the reconfigurable robot has been deployed to validate the feasibility in terms of mechanical designs, electronics, and software for long-term autonomy in the real environment. The result exhibits that after fixing the issues during the platform development state, our hTetro robot could achieve maximum area coverage performance every day during the long-term trial in a real environment than the commercial robot due to its shape-shifting ability. With the successful deployment of the reconfigurable cleaning robot, a further important step towards service robotics for daily use has been taken.
•hTetro a Tetris inspired self-reconfigurable floor cleaning robot.•Capable of performing autonomously in a constrained environment.•Conducting longterm trials in a complex food court environment as our case study.•Benchmarked the robot’s coverage performance with fixed morphology robot.•Improved system design, control system, and coverage strategy.