In the old days, a particular feature of home cleaning robots was that they might randomly bounce off the ground as a part of the cleaning process, because the technology required to locate and map an area had not yet made its way into the patron space. Everything modified in 2010 when home robots began using lidar (and other things) to trace their location and optimize your cleaning method.
Consumer pool cleaning robots lag about 15 years behind indoor robotson this topic for several reasons. First, most pool robots – unlike automatic pool cleaners, that are purely mechanical systems powered by water pressure – are plugged into an electrical outlet, which suggests maximizing efficiency is not much of a problem. Second, underwater 3D localization is a much different (and doubtless tougher) problem to unravel than indoor 2D localization. But pool robots are catching up this week at CES You know introduced an untethered robot that uses ultrasound to generate a 3D map to scrub your pool quickly and efficiently. It can be solar powered and self-emptying.
Locating and navigating underwater will not be a simple problem for any robot. Private pools are definitely privileged as operating environments with reasonable structure and predictability, at least when all the pieces works because it should. But lighting will all the time be a challenge with vibrant sunlight, deep shadow, wave reflections and sometimes cloudy water if the pool chemistry will not be well balanced. This makes counting on any light-based localization system unreliable at best, so Wybot went old fashioned by utilizing ultrasound.
Wybot restores ultrasound to the bots
Ultrasound was once a quite common way for mobile robots to navigate. You may (or may not) remember venerable robots resembling Pioneer 3with those big ultrasonic sensors on the front. As cameras and lidar have turn out to be low-cost and reliable, the mess of ultrasonic sensors has fallen out of favor, but sound continues to be ideal for underwater applications, where anything that relies on light could have problems.
The Wybot S3 uses 12 ultrasonic sensors, in addition to motor encoders and an inertial measurement unit to map residential swimming pools in three dimensions. “We had to choose the ultrasonic sensors very carefully,” explains Felix (Huo) Feng, chief technology officer at Wybot. “We actually use a lot of different sensors and calculate flight time [of the sonar pulses] calculate the distance.” The resulting map’s positioning accuracy is roughly 10 centimeters, which is good enough for the robot to do its job, although Feng says they’re actively working to enhance the map’s resolution. For path planning, the 3D map is broken down right into a series of 2D maps because the robot must clear the pool floor, stairs and ledges, in addition to the perimeters of the pool.
Efficiency is especially necessary for the S3 since the charging station has enough solar panels on top to provide the robot about 90 minutes of run time on an optimally sunny day. If your pool will not be very large, which means that the robot can clean it each day without having to attach power to the docking station. The dock also sucks up debris from the dustbin situated on the robot itself, and Wybot suggests the S3 can clean for as much as a month without overflowing the dock.
The S3 has a front-facing camera that is primarily used to discover and prioritize dirtier areas (using AI, after all) that require focused cleaning. Perhaps in the longer term Wybot will have the opportunity to make use of vision to navigate as well, but I think ultrasound will still be needed for reliable 24/7 navigation.
Another interesting tidbit is the communication system. The docking station can, after all, communicate along with your Wi-Fi network after which consult with the robot while it’s charging. However, when the robot goes for a swim, traditional wireless signals won’t work, however the docking station has its own sonar that may communicate with the robot at a rate of a couple of bytes per second. This won’t give you streaming video from the robot’s camera, but it is going to be enough so that you can have the opportunity to regulate the robot in case you want, or ask it to return to the dock, get battery status updates, and things like that.
The Wybot S3 will go on sale within the second quarter of this yr for the eye-watering price of $2,999, but that is the way it all the time works: when a brand new technology first enters the patron space, it inevitably comes at a premium. Give it time, though, and I think the flexibility to navigate and self-drain will turn out to be standard features of pool robots. But so far as I do know, Wybot got there first.
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