Astronot Darat - Bumping Robot

Last semester, for Robotics course, my team made a project about a cleaning robot. It was inspired by vacuum cleaner robot which can clean the floor by going through all points on the floor.

Roomba from iRobot
http://www.irobot.com/~/media/Images/iRobot/Robots/HRD/Roomba/500%20Series/Anatomy/irobot-Roomba500-Top-View.jpg

Cocorobo from Sharp
http://sharp-world.com/products/img/robotic_appliance/product/img_rx-v100-w-.png

This is how they work.

The concept was simple: "to clean the floor by sucking the dust with the vacuum cleaner or just mopping the floor. The hardest part was how to move the robot to make the cleaning all over the floor.

For this project, we just made it simple by making the robot change direction when hit onto something. The design of the robot was like this.

Design of the robot

We used micro switches as the sensor for detecting bumps on something.

micro switch for detecting bumps

The design initially used 8 micro switch as the sensor. But we changed it into just using 5 micro switch: front, front-left, front-right, rear-left, rear-right, because we still tolerated the robot to move along the wall (so the exactly-in-left and exactly-in-right switch must be taken off).

We planned to use a CPU fan as substitute of vacuum cleaner, since the fan can also take the dust from the floor. We found this idea after browsing on some posts on instructables.

The program we made actually was just the same with my previous project in RC Car, but with addition of procedure of changing direction.
The changing direction procedure was made simply by following this flowchart.

Flowchart of Changing Direction

 And this is our robot: Astronot Darat!

Our robot: Astronot Darat (before finishing)

Astronot Darat (after finishing)

Unfortunately, we failed to put the fan into the robot because of the limit of the case we used. So for this project, we just presented the system of changing direction haha.

Sorry I can't post the video now, I will post the video later.

Thank you for reading this post and visiting my blog!

"Don't stop running for chasing your dreams. Your dreams can always be the next step after you stop" - Tanduk Ion

PS: do you know why is it called "Astronot Darat"?
1. It looked like a UFO, so we just thought about astronaut, or astronot in Bahasa Indonesia.
2. It moved on land, not flying like UFO. Land is darat in Bahasa Indonesia.