Robotic vacuum cleaner design to mitigate slip errors in warehouses

Warehouses are extremely dusty environments due to the concrete and cardboard dust generated. This is problematic in automated warehouses that use robots to move items from one location to another. If the robot slips, it can collide with other robots or lose track of where it is located. Currently, to reduce the amount of dust on the floor, warehouses use industrial scrubbers that users walk behind or ride. This requires manual labor and a regular scheduled maintenance plan that needs to be followed to mitigate the dust accumulation. Therefore, an industrial robotic vacuum cleaner that can continuously clean the warehouse floors is proposed. The five key parts to a vacuum are inlet duct, brush roller, filtration, storage, and suction. This thesis will discuss in detail the design and development of the filtration, storage, and suction of the robotic vacuums that were developed in this project. The thesis will go through design considerations and computational fluid dynamics that were conducted to validate and improve the design. Then, it will discuss the experimental results of the robotic vacuum cleaners.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Schilling, Benjamin Fritz

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Maria Yang.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/114052

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/114052