Smart Vacuum Cleaner – An Autonomous Location-Aware Cleaning Device

Abstract

For many devices in a ubiquitous computing environment the ability to recognize their present position is an essential feature. Nowadays, stationary or mobile Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) [1] antennas are often used to detect the position of mobile RFID-tagged objects (e.g., RFID gates in logistics; RFID combined with motion trackers in Magic Touch [2]). In this poster, we present a prototype of an autonomous mobile cleaning robot which implements an opposite, self-positioning approach. Enhanced with an RFID antenna, this device learns its present location by detecting small RFID tags spread on the floor and adjusts its behavior according to this information.