Design and Performance Evaluation of a Low-Cost Arduino-Based Automatic Floor Cleaning Robot with Multi-Sensor Obstacle Avoidance
Keywords:
Arduino Uno, Cleaning robot, Floor cleaning, HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor, Obstacle avoidance, Service robotics, Vacuum suctionAbstract
This study describes the design, fabrication, and laboratory evaluation of a compact, low-cost floor cleaning robot built around an Arduino Uno (ATmega328P) microcontroller. The machine combines three cleaning actions — dry sweeping with a roller brush, vacuum suction, and a wet mopping pass fed by a small peristaltic pump — and it navigates cluttered indoor spaces using three HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensors together with infrared cliff detectors. A simple reflex-based control algorithm handles obstacle avoidance, edge detection, and tank monitoring without requiring any map of the environment. A bench prototype was assembled for roughly USD 68 in parts and tested on five common floor surfaces in a 25 m² instrumented room. In repeated trials, the robot removed an average of 96.4% of a standard dust mixture from ceramic tile in a single dry pass, responded to obstacles in 0.62 s on average (well inside the 1.0 s safety budget), and covered about 98% of the test area in 45 minutes while consuming 66% of its battery charge. The results suggest that carefully integrated commodity hardware can deliver cleaning performance that approaches entry-level commercial units at a fraction of their cost. All measured data reported here are illustrative results from a bench prototype and are intended as a model experimental framework.
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