Stair-climbing robots: One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind
Team update, Global Product Development | By Platypus Labs: Ashis Ghosh, Purva Juvekar, Jacqueline Nguyen, Michael Oudenhoven
In the coming decades, more than 20% of the U.S. population will be over age 65. Surveys show that almost 90% of these individuals wish to live in their own homes for the duration of their lives. However, the physical demands of maintaining and cleaning a home can make this difficult. Automated cleaning technology, such as robot vacuums, open new possibilities — but current robotic vacuums cannot access multi-story homes because they do not climb stairs. Instead, these heavy objects have to be carried up and down between floors, which is especially difficult for someone with low mobility.
To solve this, Platypus Labs has set out to build the first stair-climbing robot vacuum to address this technology and market gap. Our product, called Tenzing, is the solution to enable your parents and grandparents to be where they want to be. With a compact stair-climbing mechanism, Tenzing will be an easy-to-use, autonomous robot vacuum with the ability to be controlled by a phone application, climb stairs, and clean corners effectively. It was named after Tenzing Norgay, one of the first two individuals to climb Mount Everest.
User Research and Concept Generation
Through the Global Product Development course offered by the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, the team learned the principles of human-centered design, which we applied during the problem framing, needfinding, and need validation stages.
We first set out to understand the current automated cleaning industry, conducting user interviews to uncover people’s pain points when it comes to keeping a house neat and tidy. Time and time again, we heard that household upkeep was a menial task that our interviewees just did not want to deal with. One interviewee described his current experience of vacuuming:
“Dragging the big beast thing around, having to go back and forth doing the physical labor...”
As we clustered our insights and further dug into our target market, a couple of things became clear: cleaning is annoying, cumbersome physical work that is also very difficult if you are an older individual or have mobility issues.
We dove further into the notion of “assistive technology” — what helpful devices have been created to help people take care of their home and lessen manual labor? Robot vacuums such as the iRobot Roomba were the first solution to come up. Further interviews with owners of these devices were full of praise, with a couple of caveats. Users reported that the ability to leave home and leave any worry about cleaning to this device — giving it agency over the task — was great. One early adopter of the Roomba said:
“Coming home to a clean floor was the best part about it, and not having to do the work.”
The main issues that arose involved the robot vacuum’s inability to deal with certain areas. This often came up if the space was small, if there were ledges in between rooms, and, most importantly, if there were stairs. When extrapolated to the elder generation, we realized this was a huge issue. An iRobot Roomba can weigh 4kg (about nine pounds). This is not a weight you want an elderly individual to have to carry up and down the stairs.
Our process involved using the Double Diamond methodology to commence the project with divergent thinking into different problem statements, followed by convergent thinking to narrow down the potential solutions.
We did competitive benchmarking of our different concepts, conducted user interviews, and got feedback on our concepts through system usability scores and user ranking.
Selection of a Climbing Mechanism
A part of our design research was to look at the different stair climbing mechanisms that already existed. The team looked at designs from hobbyists, industrial solutions, research papers and patents.
Tenzing
From our interviews and feedback emerged three final concepts, liked by users for their different features and abilities. We made use of the SCAMPER method, a creativity tool used to encourage students to think of out-of-the-box solutions, to combine the beneficial features of our three final concepts into one concept: Tenzing.
Tenzing will be a stair-climbing robot vacuum that uses a mobile application interface to manage the robot. This interface will give users the ability to see the status of a cleaning, schedule additional cleanings on multiple levels of their home, and receive push notifications if their robot needs maintenance. If the robot gets stuck during a cleaning, the user will be able to use the mobile app to remotely control the robot and get it unstuck.
Prototyping Process
The prototyping process was split into three broad stages — low-fidelity, medium-fidelity and high-fidelity. We added features with each successive prototype, culminating in our final prototype, which will be presented at the Jacobs Design Showcase.
In the middle of our team’s prototyping process, our team was able to travel to Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China, to visit incubators, manufacturing facilities, and research parks. Through this experience, we were able to gain valuable insight into the development of products and how to bring them to market — and as a result, we were able to reshape our strategy upon returning to the United States.
One of the most relevant visits we made on this field trip was seeing Narwel at the XBot Park. The Narwel team is developing a cleaning robot specifically tailored to floor mopping, due to a prevalence of non-carpet flooring in Asia. As we narrow in on our exact target market, mopping features, or at least an alternate version of this, is something we may want to consider. Another visit that was extremely valuable for helping us understand our target market was the visit to the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks’ demo for Smart Living. The demo was focused on how the elderly might live in the future, and it gave us insight on how to design for that ecosystem.
Reflecting on Our Prototypes
In our earlier iterations, we chose to make most parts (such as legs, rotating arms, enclosure, gears, and shafts) using laser-cut wood to check for sizing and prototype rapidly. This caused some unique problems in two areas: gluing and the breaking of the wooden shaft. Since everything was the same material, gluing proved to be a problem, as we accidentally glued entire sections together (legs + rotation arm + gear, shaft + gear), restricting the intended movement of parts. The wooden shaft also caused problems, as it could not sustain the torque produced by the gears. The wooden dowel we used first slipped, and the square shaft we made later snapped.
On further analysis, we decided to replace the wooden shaft with a hollow steel one, along with creating custom 3D-printed bearings to assist in better rotation. This enabled our climbing mechanism to function more smoothly, and we were successfully able to operate the prototype on a pair of stairs.
As we continue to finish our final prototype, we look forward to presenting it at the Design Showcase and to sharing the work we have done over this semester.
Sources
[1] Zhang, L., Yang, Y., Gu, Y., Sun, X., Yao, X., & Shuai, L.(2016). A New Compact Stair-Cleaning Robot. ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics. doi: 10.1115/1.4032700.
Follow along with Platypus Labs and their Global Product Development classmates as they continue to develop their projects, drawing from expert insights, a field trip to Hong Kong and China, and more along the way.Over the course of the semester, we’re sharing blog posts from each student team here on Medium (read posts from Team JARAD, Team Million Hands, Team Cycle Paths, Team Back2Bed, and Team Bluem). You can also learn more about the course here.
