Smart Vacuum Cleaner - An Autonomous Location-Aware Cleaning Device

Svetlana Domnitcheva, domnitch@inf.ethz.ch

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) 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). 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.