Avoidance of falling and collision for a stair-cleaning robot

Although various stair climbing or cleaning robots have been proposed and developed, few of them can move on the tread to do cleaning. Hence, the avoidance of falling and collision for a stair-cleaning robot has not been thoroughly solved. In this paper, based on our newly developed stair-cleaning robot, several methods are proposed or introduced to solve three kinds of problems concerning the avoidance of falling and collision. The proposed methods solve the problem of no falling before and when the robot is climbing. The proposed methods can assure no falling and few slight collisions when the robot is moving on the tread. A new turning approach is proposed and solves the problem of successful turning on the tread of the stairs for a stair-cleaning robot. Experimental results show that our methods are effective and stable.