Robot vacuum cleaner, anti-theft of his grade 11 pupil

Only a few tens of thousands of people, Pham Ngoc Thang, 11A10 high school student Tran Phu High School (Hanoi) invented a robot with two useful features: vacuuming and anti-theft.

Multi-purpose robot

Accidentally read the newspaper, found that in the United States, there is a robot vacuum cleaner automatically diverted when encountering obstacles, costing about 200 USD, Pham Ngoc Thang came up with the idea of ​​building a robot with similar features but low cost, affordable Vietnamese people money.

Thang's versatile robot (Photo: New HN Weekend)

In January 2006, Thang immediately embarked on the " invention " robot. My material consists of a cardboard box, wheels, spinning wheels, sound generators, light bulbs, sub-batteries . " gut " from children's toys.

Not wanting to disturb his parents, Thang fasted for breakfast to spend money on toys to . break."There was a time when the device was broken and all the money was bought, I had to ask the children of the neighbors the broken toys," Thang said.

After a while of tinkering, Thang's robot is also completed with superior features. The start switch has two steps: the first step for the robot to vacuum, and the second step will turn it into a "door guard", which has anti-theft effects. The robot weighs about 800 grams and according to Thang, it will be lighter and move faster if you replace the cardboard box with a plastic box.

The principle of operation of " multi-purpose robot " is quite simple. It can be vacuumed by a fan mounted in the middle of the body. At start-up, the robot moves with the wheels underneath, the rotor rotates and absorbs dust on top, dust will be retained by a filter cloth. When tested, robots also easily suck small pieces of scrap paper.

The special thing is that Thang has installed a set of spinning wheels so the robot can change direction when touching the obstacle. Thanks to the built-in sensor, when the robot is dropped, it will signal with a warning light for the user to rebuild.

In addition, thanks to the audio transmitter including speakers, chips and sensors, when starting step 2, just touch lightly, the robot will emit a loud siren, alert the landlord.

The versatile robot is operated with 5 AA batteries (1.5 V type / 1 tablet). This energy source will help it vacuum up in 1.5 hours. If used to prevent theft, the power consumption is low, battery life is much. The total cost of making robots, according to Thang's estimate, is about VND 35,000-40,000.

Write manufacturing software

Successfully manufacturing products, Pham Ngoc Thang started writing software to guide the manufacture, repair and use of his multi-purpose robots. With Visual Basic 6.0 programming program, Thang has completed the software with four basic parts: Introduction to versatile robots and authors; instructions for using software, using robots and how to fix them when problems occur; 9th grade physics knowledge, circuit knowledge, robot making (homemade sensor types) and help.

Now that the software has finished writing, Thang wants to edit it carefully before putting it online so that anyone who wants to build the robot can download it for free.

Mr. Pham Ngoc Thanh, Thang's father, said that this 11th grade pupil is also the author of "massage machine", the product won the prize of encouragement of the Science and Technology Innovation Contest for youth and children nationwide in 2004-2005.

Thang confided: "I just hope the versatile robot is invested to develop some more powerful features. Because I believe it is capable of applying in practice, the price is much cheaper than the products. Foreign imports have the same features ".