Introduction:

The goal of the report is to demonstrate the process of our team to develop pre-feed mechanism of the clean base for a robotic vacuum. The whole machine has consisted of two parts: the declumper and the wisper. In general, our team design the CAD model, print it out and add a stepper motor as the extra power source to test the prototype.

As the Robotic Vacuum has been popular and many people prefer to use them to clean the house, in order to make sweeping easier, people want to develop the clean base automatic dirt disposal system to help clean the debris out of the robot at the end of each mission. Therefore, in order to better understand and test the performance of the clean base, our objective is to make the clean base fill bins quickly and efficiently in a similar situation as to where it works. The current solution of the clean base uses a conveyor belt which allows the robot or cleaning head can ride on, picking up any dirt on the belt. However, the current solution cannot dispense the pet hair onto the belt. As the whole system can be separated into two parts: the pre-feed mechanism and the input mechanism. Our whole team was separated into two small groups, and my group focused on developing the declumper which is the pre-feed mechanism of the whole system. Therefore our design goals are to design and build a prototype to effectively declump bulk cotton, and in order to simulate the pet airs, we use cotton, as a reasonable substitute for testing the automatic dirt disposal functionality. Also, we need to improve upon the previous design to achieve the desired wispocity of the cotton because the cotton fibers are too interwoven with one another and come in large bundles that will bind most machinery, creating a more uniform larger mass, if we use the cotton directly from the market, and it cannot mimic the real situation as the pet hairs, as smaller less dense groupings of fibers. Also, we need to add an access hatch on the side of the mechanism and create an enclosure for electrical components.