Bio

My name is Pablo Martín Ruales and I’m from Quito, Ecuador. I’m a third-year physics student at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, and I recently started studying a minor in electrical engineering. My interest is currently directed toward material science. I am also determined to pick up a hobby in robotics, using Mathematica and the Wolfram Language.

Project: Indoor Positioning System and Path Mapping Using a Roomba Vacuum Cleaner

Precise indoor location has not been commercially introduced—this feature can be the next step to the automation of homes and everyday life itself. This project involves a Roomba vacuum cleaner, in which I will embed a device that senses and uploads the direction and acceleration that this automatic vacuum cleaner takes in a set of given intervals of time to the Wolfram Cloud. Afterward, this information will be analyzed with Mathematica to deduce the path that the Roomba took and reconstruct a map of the area. The device mentioned above will essentially contain an accelerometer, a microcontroller such as Arduino, and a single board computer like a Raspberry Pi, which will be programmed using the Wolfram Language and will be given direct access to the Wolfram Cloud. Furthermore, this method will provide a sufficiently precise indoor location system that can be integrated into phones or any other device. Finally, the next phase of this project includes machine learning, and has the objective of computing new and more efficient paths. The path will be computed by an algorithm in Mathematica and sent to the Arduino, which will control the Roomba. Therefore, the cleaning cycles can be optimized.

Roomba free walks

Controlled path