Design Requirements

Explicit Requirements

The explicit requirements stemming from the project specifications include:

• Robot must clean entire surface of a 5’ x 6’ window partitioned by a vertical or horizontal separator.
• Device must clean at a speed of 10 ft²/min.
• Robot must be capable of crossing a separator that can be placed either horizontally or vertically.
• Robot must not produce any streaking or leave any significant residual moisture, which will be inspected for 30 seconds after the completion of the cleaning of the entire window.
• During the inspection period, the window should appear to be clean.
• Device must be portable and its retracted footprint should not exceed 2 ft².
• Robot must use a dedicated supply of power, and cannot be run off of the laboratory bench power supplies.
• Device must not damage anything with which it interacts.
• The elements required for the robot’s operation should be carried on the robot itself; nothing may be attached to the window or its frame.

Implicit Requirements

There are also requirements not which are not necessarily stated in the project description, but which are still necessary to accomplish the task. These include:

• The device must have a mechanism to adhere to the window in order to resist the force of gravity.
• The robot must utilize some method of locomotion in order to travel to different areas of the window.
• The chosen method of locomotion must incorporate some feature that allows the robot to go over the horizontal/vertical divider.
• The robot must wipe the surface of the window with some sort of damp material.
• The robot must be able to sense when it needs to switch direction and when it needs to overcome the divider.

Coolness Factors

Additionally, there are factors which are not necessarily required but would definitely contribute to the effectiveness and the performance of the robot. The ones that we looked into incorporating into our design were:

• Incorporating a system to reapply cleaning solution to our cleaning pad for each cleaning stroke that occurs, ensuring that the cleaning pad doesn’t run out of moisture as it goes along.
• Rack and pinion system that allows for realistic upgrade to a full system. Our robot could be adapted to fully step over higher barriers, due to the scalability of this system.
• Fully onboard system - we have all of our electronic processing within our robot in a custom PCB.