This user has found a way to make his robot vacuum cleaner climb the stairs: turn it into a drone.
All robot vacuum cleaners on the market have the same problem: the stairs. Many of them are able to detect the steps so as not to fall and suffer damage, but for the moment raising and lowering them to clean different floors is a task that they cannot perform. But to the problems, solutions, or in this case, three turbines that turn any robot vacuum cleaner into a flying robot vacuum cleaner.
This is what Peter Stripol has done, a youtuber from the United States who has a channel dedicated to engineering and specialized in drones. His latest invention is a flying robot vacuum cleaner that can be controlled using a remote control, as if it were a drone, so you can climb the stairs and clean on other floors. It is, at least, curious to see.
Clean (sort of) and fly
The robot vacuum cleaner, claims the YouTuber, is one of the cheapest you can find on Amazon. It cost 39 dollars and is very similar to this, although the final price amounted to about $ 200 after purchasing the thrusters which were attached to the sides. It is a tricopter, so the motors were placed in a “Y” shape and adjusted manually. This allows the two front propellers to counteract each other and the rear propeller can be fitted with a rudder (made of wood, in this case) to change the direction of flight.
This peculiar robot is actually made up of two devices. The first is the robot vacuum cleaner, which moves autonomously like any ordinary robot vacuum cleaner and cannot be controlled. The second is the controller, which has been placed in the upper area. This is a controller that they have developed themselves and have been working on, they say, for two years. This must always be connected to an external battery that at the beginning we see how they hold it with the hand and that finally ends up attached to the robot itself with two strips of tape.
The design works, as can be seen, but it has several issues to consider. The first is that when the controller is attached in the upper area, removing the tank to clean it becomes complicated (although all is said, the robot sucks rather little). The second is that the three turbines have so much power that, on the one hand, add a lot of noise to what the robot already makes per se, and on the other hand, when they are activated they expel dirt to the sides, which makes cleaning difficult.
However, special mention for the motor, which is capable of lifting the robot, weighing just over a kilo and a half, to a second floor barely tousled. It is true that it is not very stable, it tends to go sideways and the landings are quite rough because it does not have anything like a landing gear, but for something that has been created in a garage by two people it is not bad at all.
It is not the first time that we have seen a robot vacuum cleaner modified to do other accessory cleaning tasks. One of the most striking was the robot vacuum cleaner that screamed with every crash developed by Michael Reeves. This was completely modified to implement an on-board computer, two optical sensors, a small speaker and a radio receiver and the result is, to say the least, fun.
