S-Sacrr: A Staircase and Slope Accessing Reconfigurable Cleaning Robot and its Validation

Abstract

The next giant leap in the commercial robot cleaning market is cleaning the staircases and slope structures, leading to full-fledged building maintenance. So far, numerous robotic designs have been proposed to execute cleaning tasks on the staircase and slope surfaces. However, most existing robot designs could only perform cleaning in any one of the mentioned surfaces, often without any reconfiguring feature that expands its ability to perform the area coverage on both structures. In this letter, we introduce a novel robotic platform called s-Sacrr: A staircase and slope accessing reconfigurable cleaning robot that can traverse surfaces such as the floor, staircase, and slope by changing its morphology for area-coverage operation. s-Sacrr was designed as a three-stage traversing platform that consists of three modules connected with a vertical linear actuator which aids in reconfiguration as required during steps and slopes access. Specifically, the morphological transformation feature maintains the stability and evades the toppling effect of the robot. We evaluated the s-Sacrr robot’s smooth traversing and area-coverage ability on the staircase and slope surfaces. The experimental result demonstrates the s-Sacrr ability to access stairs and inclined surfaces.