New scrubbing robot could contribute to automation of household chores

While the advent of robotic systems that can complete household chores has been widely anticipated, those commercially released so far are primarily robot vacuums that autonomously clean the floor. In contrast, robots that can reliably clean surfaces, tidy up, cook or perform other tasks in home environments are either too expensive or have not yet reached the market.

Researchers at Northeastern University recently developed SCCRUB, a soft robotic arm that can complete a chore beyond hoovering and mopping, which many people find tedious, namely scrubbing surfaces clean. The new robotic arm, introduced in a paper on the arXiv preprint server, was found to successfully clean dirty, burnt and greasy surfaces, removing over 99.% of residue adhered to them.

“Our recent study builds on one of our earlier papers published in Science Robotics,” Jeffrey Lipton, senior author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “We knew we had a new type of robot arm that could deliver the power of a drill through a soft robotic arm. We wanted to show what else we could do with this new platform.”

To further test the effectiveness of the soft robotic arm they developed, Lipton and his colleagues started browsing online, searching for viable real-world applications. They soon noticed that one of the drill accessories most purchased on Amazon was a scrubber, which inspired them to integrate it with their arm.

“I think many people have exerted themselves scrubbing something only to think: ‘Why can’t a robot be doing this?'” said Jakub F. Kowalewski, first author of the paper. “The reality is that robot arms that are powerful enough for heavy-duty cleaning often aren’t safe around people. Our goal was to show how robots that combine flexibility and rigidity can be soft and safe yet powerful enough to scrub tough grime with a brush.”

SCCRUB, the new robotic arm introduced by the researchers, has three main components. These include a counter-rotating scrubber brush, new deep learning-based software controller that plans the actions required to clean and robot components previously developed by Lipton and his colleagues, referred to as TRUNC cells.

“TRUNC stands for torsionally rigid universal couplings,” explained Lipton. “These cells can bend, extend, and flex while transmitting torque. By chaining and nesting them, we build a robot arm that is lightweight and soft but able to put a hand drill’s worth of torque through the arm. This allows us to make the arm safe for contacting surfaces and working around people while delivering the power needed to scrub dirt and grime.”

The actions of the SCCRUB robot are planned by a machine learning-based controller that plans the movements of specific parts of the robot to ensure that they reach desired positions, while also accounting for the arm’s flexibility. In addition, the team added a bristled brush attachment to their robotic arm that can scrub dirt and residue from surfaces.

“The brush attachment for the SCCRUB arm uses a planetary gear box to counter-rotate the brush,” said Alyssa Ugent, co-author of the paper. “By canceling out the frictional forces, the counter-rotating brush allows the soft arm to firmly press into a surface while maintaining its position.”

The researchers tested a prototype of the SCCRUB arm in a series of experiments, as part of which it cleaned different types of “messes.” They found that the arm successfully cleaned both a glass plate that was previously placed in the microwave with ketchup on it and a toilet seat with blueberry fruit preserve adhered to it, removing almost all the residue.

“Our soft arm can work with and around humans, in human spaces, but deliver the power typically only found in expensive hard robots,” said Lipton.

“We hope this new way of making robots will allow robots to share our spaces and world alongside us on tasks that are dull and dirty without being dangerous. We now plan to continue to refine the arm used in SCCRUB to do other tasks.”

The new robotic scrubber developed by this research team could soon be improved further, to broaden the range of chores that it can successfully tackle. Lipton and his colleagues hope that it will eventually make its way out of their lab and into real-world household environments.

“I hope to one day see soft robotic arms safely assisting humans across a wide range of settings, from industrial environments to everyday domestic tasks,” added Kowalewski.

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