Patent Application
20200345198
The present disclosure relates to a technical field of smart home, and more particularly, to a cleaning device and a sweeping assembly thereof.
With the development of technology, a variety of automatic cleaning devices have emerged, such as automatic sweeping robots, automatic mopping robots, and so on. The automatic cleaning device may perform cleaning operations automatically, which brings convenience to users. For example, the automatic sweeping robot achieves automatic cleaning of places through direct brushing, vacuum cleaning, and other technologies.
The present disclosure provides a cleaning device and a sweeping assembly thereof, to solve the defects in the related art.
According to a first aspect of the present disclosure, a sweeping assembly for a cleaning device is provided, and includes: a brush holder defining an accommodating cavity therein; a main brushroll accommodated in the accommodating cavity of the brush holder, and including a cleaning part located at a middle portion of the main brushroll and a connecting part located at an end of the main brushroll, the cleaning part including a brush member protruding outward therefrom, the connecting part being connected to the brush holder or a driver of the cleaning device; and an anti-winding structure arranged at the connecting part, and including a first end connected to one of the brush holder and the connecting part, and a second end abutting against the other one of the brush holder and the connecting part.
According to a second aspect of the present disclosure, a sweeping assembly for a cleaning device is provided, and includes: a side-brush holder disposed at a bottom of the cleaning device, the side-brush holder defining a side-brush accommodating chamber therein; a side brush arranged least partially in the side-brush holder, and including a base and a brush member protruding outward from the base, and the base being connected to a driver of the cleaning device to rotate the side brush; and an anti-winding structure arranged at the base, and including a first end fixed to one of the base and the side-brush holder, and a second end abutting against the other one of the base and the side-brush holder.
According to a third aspect of the present disclosure, a cleaning device is provided, and includes: a sweeping assembly; and a driver connected to the sweeping assembly and configured to drive the sweeping assembly to rotate. The sweeping assembly includes: a brush holder; a brush body arranged in the brush holder, and including a cleaning part and a connecting part connected to each other, the connecting part being further connected to the driver to rotate the brush body, the cleaning part including a brush member protruding outward therefrom; and an anti-winding structure arranged at the connecting part, and configured to fill up a gap between the brush holder and the connecting part.
It is to be understood that both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description are exemplary and explanatory only and are not restrictive of the disclosure.
The accompanying drawings, which are incorporated in and constitute a part of this specification, illustrate embodiments consistent with the present disclosure and, together with the description, serve to explain the principles of the present disclosure.
Reference will now be made in detail to embodiments, examples of which are illustrated in the accompanying drawings. The following description refers to the accompanying drawings in which the same numbers in different drawings represent the same or similar elements unless otherwise represented. The implementations set forth in the following description of embodiments do not represent all implementations consistent with the invention. Instead, they are merely examples of apparatuses and methods consistent with aspects related to the invention as recited in the appended claims.
The robot body 110 includes a forward portion 1101 and a rearward portion 1102, and has an approximately round shape (both front and rear ends being round). The robot body 110 may have other shapes, for example including but not limited to an approximate D shape which has a square front end and a round rear end.
The sensing system 120 includes a position determining device 1201 located above the robot body 110, a bumper sensor 1202 located at the forward portion 1101 of the robot body 110, a cliff sensor 1203, an ultrasonic sensor (not shown), an infrared sensor (not shown), a magnetometer (not shown), an accelerometer (not shown), a gyroscope (not shown), an odometer (not shown) and other sensing devices, so as to provide the control system 130 with various position information and motion state information of the robot. The position determining device 1201 includes a camera and a laser distance sensor (LDS), but is not limited thereto.
The forward portion 1101 of the robot body 110 may carry the bumper sensor 1202. When a drive wheel module 141 pushes the robot to walk on the ground in a cleaning process, the bumper sensor 1202 detects one or more events (or objects) in a travel path of the robot 100, via the sensing system, for example the infrared sensor. The robot may control the drive wheel module 141 so as to respond to the events (or objects), for example, keeping away from obstacles, based on the events (or objects) detected by the bumper sensor 1202, such as the obstacles, walls, etc.
The control system 130 is provided on a circuit mainboard inside the robot body 110, and includes a computing processor communicated with a non-transitory memory (e.g. a hard disk, a flash memory or a RAM), such as a central processing unit and an application processor, in which the application processor utilizes a positioning algorithm, for example SLAM, to draw a real-time map of the environment where the robot is, based on the obstacle information fed back by the LDS. Moreover, the control system 130 comprehensively determines a current working state of the sweeping robot in combination with distance information and speed information fed back by the bumper sensor 1202, the cliff sensor 1203, the ultrasonic sensor, the infrared sensor, the magnetometer, the accelerometer, the gyroscope, the odometer and the like. For instance, the sweeping robot is going across a doorsill, going onto a carpet, or located at the cliff; or an upper portion or a lower portion of the sweeping robot is stuck; or a dust box thereof is full; or the sweeping robot is lifted. The control system 130 may further give the next specific action strategy in the light of above different situations, to make the working of the robot more in line with the requirements of the owner and thus ensure a better user experience. Further, the control system 130 may plan the most efficient and reasonable sweeping path and sweeping mode based on information of the real-time map drawn through SLAM, thus improving a sweeping efficiency of the robot greatly.
The human-robot interaction system 170 includes keys provided on a panel of the main machine and configured for function selection by the user. The human-device interaction system 170 may further include a display screen and/or an indicator light and/or a speaker that are configured to show the user the current state of the robot or function options. Moreover, the human-device interaction system 170 may further include a mobile client program. For a cleaning device of a path-navigation type, a mobile client may show the user a map of an environment where the device is located, and a location of the robot, so as to provide the user with richer and user-friendlier function options.
To enable the robot to move on the ground more stably or have a stronger moving ability, the robot may include one or more driven wheels 142 which include but are not limited to universal wheels. The drive wheel module includes a travel wheel, a drive motor, and a control circuit for controlling the drive motor, and may be connected with a circuit for measuring a drive current and an odometer. The drive wheel module 141 may be detachably connected to the robot body 110, thus facilitating assembling, disassembling, and maintenance thereof. The drive wheel module may have an offset drop-type suspension system, be fastened in a movable manner, for example, attached to the robot body 110 in a rotatable manner, and receive a spring offset biased downwards and away from the robot body 110. The spring offset allows the drive wheel to maintain contact and traction with the ground by a certain ground adhesive force, and meanwhile, a cleaning element of the robot 100 also touches the ground with a certain pressure.
The cleaning system 150 may be configured as a dry cleaning system and/or a wet cleaning system. As the dry cleaning system, the main cleaning function comes from a sweeping system 151 including a brushroll structure, a dust box structure, a fan structure, an air outlet, and connecting members among the four parts. The brushroll structure that has certain interference with the ground sweeps up rubbish on the ground and carries it to a dust suction port between the brushroll structure and the dust box structure, and then the rubbish is sucked into the dust box structure by a suction gas generated by the fan structure and passing through the dust box structure. A dedusting capability of the sweeping robot may be represented by a dust pick up (DPU) efficiency, and the DPU efficiency is influenced by a structure and materials of a brushroll, by a wind power utilization rate of air channels constituted by the dust suction port, the dust box structure, the fan structure, the air outlet and the connecting members among the four parts, and by a type and a power of a fan, and thus the DPU efficiency is a complex system design issue. Compared with an ordinary plug-in cleaner, enhancement of the dedusting capability is more significant for a cleaning robot with limited energy. Because the enhancement of the dedusting capability lowers an energy requirement effectively, i.e., the robot, which originally sweeps 80 square meters of ground on one charge, may sweep 100 square meters of ground or even more on one charge now. Moreover, a service life of a battery will be extended greatly due to the reduced number of charge cycles, such that the frequency of replacing the battery by a user will be decreased. More intuitively and importantly, the enhancement of the dedusting capability brings the most prominent and significant user experience, and the user may directly draw a conclusion whether the robot sweeps or wipes cleanly. The dry cleaning system may further include a side brush 152 having a rotating shaft, and the rotating shaft has a certain angle relative to the ground, so as to move debris into a brushroll region of the cleaning system 150.
When the cleaning system 150 implements a cleaning operation, objects to be cleaned may be divided into two types, i.e. heavy particles and light debris. The light debris includes human and animal hair, strings, threads, carpet fibers and etc., which are easily stretched to wrap around a brush body of the cleaning system 150, and the accumulation of the light debris may degrade performance of the brush body in various ways. For example, the light debris may cover and tightly wrap around bristles of the brush body and be tangled with the bristles, thus resulting in extra friction and hence hindering rotation of the brush body. Furthermore, if the light debris are not removed in time, the light debris may accumulate up to a joint of the brush body and a brush holder on which the brush body is arranged, and then be carried into a gear box and other regions, thus damaging the gear box or causing other unexpected situations. Additionally, the light debris accumulated on the brush body may result in internal imbalance of the brush body and produce noise or vibration during the rotation of the brush body.
Therefore, the present disclosure aims to solve the above technical problems existing in the related art through structural improvement on a sweeping assembly (equivalent to the cleaning system 150) of the automatic cleaning device.
In technical solutions of the present disclosure, the sweeping assembly of the automatic cleaning device may include: a brush body and a brush holder configured to accommodate the brush body; an anti-winding structure located at a joint of the brush body and the brush holder and configured to at least partially fill a gap at the joint when the sweeping assembly is in a working state. In one or more embodiments, the anti-winding structure is configured to fill up the gap at the joint when the sweeping assembly is in the working state. In this embodiment, by providing the anti-winding structure at the joint of the brush body and the brush holder, the gap between the brush body and the brush holder may be blocked to prevent elongated objects, especially hair, from entering a drive part (i.e. a gear box) of the brush body through the gap and affecting the rotation of the brush body, thus reducing a damage rate of the drive part and improving reliability of the automatic cleaning device.
Actually, the brush body of the automatic cleaning device may have various types, and a fitting relationship among the brush body, the brush holder and the anti-winding structure for each type will be described in detail.
1. Main Brushroll Structure
In one or more embodiments, as shown in
The cleaning part 111 is configured to perform a sweeping function of the main brushroll 11 and includes a cylindrical rotating portion (not shown in drawings) and a rubber brush member or a hairbrush member (not shown in drawings; actually, the rubber brush member and the hairbrush member both are included simultaneously in the embodiment illustrated in
The rotating-shaft connecting part 112 is fitted with a drive motor (not shown in drawings) to drive the cleaning part 111 to rotate axially, thus performing the cleaning operation. Meanwhile, the rotating-shaft connecting part 112 and the driven connecting part 113 further need to be mounted to and fitted with other parts of the automatic cleaning device, and thus a first circumferential protrusion 112A is formed at the rotating-shaft connecting part 112 and a second circumferential protrusion 113A is formed at the driven connecting part 113, such that the cleaning part 111 can be provided with external conditions for performing the cleaning operation.
It should be noted that, in some automatic cleaning devices, the first circumferential protrusion 112A, the second circumferential protrusion 113A, and the cylindrical rotating portion of the cleaning part 111 may be configured as an integral structure, which may not be dissembled without breaking the integral structure. In other automatic cleaning devices, the first circumferential protrusion 112A and the second circumferential protrusion 113A may be configured as separate detachable structures, and since the first circumferential protrusion 112A and the second circumferential protrusion 113A are located at the two ends of the main brushroll 11, they are called “end covers.”
Fitted with the main brushroll 11 described above, the brushroll holder in this embodiment may include a brushroll chamber 12 shown in
As shown in
Because the second recessed region 122 corresponds to the rotating-shaft connecting part 112, an opening 124 is formed in an end face of the brushroll chamber 12, in which the end face is located at a side of the brushroll chamber 12 corresponding to the second recessed region 122, such that the rotating shaft at the rotating-shaft connecting part 112 may be connected to a power output end of the drive motor through the opening 124.
As shown in
For ease of understanding,
In one or more embodiments, when the joint of the brush body and the brush holder, i.e. a joint of the main brushroll 11 and the brushroll chamber 12 and a joint of the main brushroll 11 and the brushroll casing 13, is described based on corresponding regions of the main brushroll 11, the joint may be located at one or more of following regions: a first joint region between the cleaning part 111 and the rotating-shaft connecting part 112, and a second joint region between the cleaning part 111 and the driven connecting part 113.
Similarly,
In this disclosure, the anti-winding structure may include one or more bristles. While the roller brush moves during a working state, debris including hair and wool may be inevitably wrapped in the roller brush shaft and move toward the first and second joint regions. When there is no anti-winding structure, the debris may fill the gap quickly, resulting in rolling roller rotation difficulty or even stopping the rolling roller completely. The anti-winding structure prevents the debris from moving into the gap. Alternatively or additionally, the anti-winding structure may automatically clean up the debris from the gaps.
1) In the embodiment shown in
2) Alternatively or additionally, the first circumferential protrusion 112A may be provided with at least one first anti-winding groove 112B disposed circumferentially. For example, as shown in
3) Alternatively or additionally, at least one second anti-winding groove 112C disposed circumferentially may be formed at a junction of the cleaning part 111 and the first circumferential protrusion 112A. For example, as shown in
4) As shown in
Because both bottom surfaces of the end-face side wall 125 and the first brushroll-chamber baffle 126 are lower than a top point P of a periphery of the first circumferential protrusion 112A (i.e. the second recessed region 122 partially surrounds the first circumferential protrusion 112A), an air-channel gap indicated by a black thick arrow in an upper portion of
In the disclosure, besides the rotating-shaft connecting part 112 shown in
Alternatively or additionally, similar curved channels may be formed between the brushroll casing 13 and the main brushroll 11, to realize the anti-winding function. For example, as shown in
Similarly, for example, as shown in
5) The first anti-winding structure 21 and the second anti-winding structure 22 do not necessarily exist simultaneously. For example, in an embodiment, only the first anti-winding structure 21 or only the second anti-winding structure 22 is present, which may be selected according to actual situations.
6) The first anti-winding structure 21 (the same applies to the second anti-winding structure 22, and the first anti-winding structure 21 is just taken as an example) may be provided to any one of the main brushroll 11, the brushroll chamber 12 and the brushroll casing 13, or two or even three thereof. For example, when the first anti-winding structure 21 is provided to the brushroll chamber 12, the first anti-winding structure 21 may be located at the top inner wall of the second recessed region 122, i.e. one end of the first anti-winding structure 21 is fixed to the top inner side of the second recessed region 122, and the other end thereof faces the first circumferential protrusion 112A, for example, touching and abutting against the surface of the first circumferential protrusion 112A, whose working principle is similar to the embodiment shown in
When the first anti-winding structure 21 is provided to the main brushroll 11, one end of the first anti-winding structure 21 is fixed to the first circumferential protrusion 112A, and the other end thereof faces a radial outer side of the first circumferential protrusion 112A, such that when the main brushroll 11 rotates axially, the first anti-winding structure 21 may rotate along with the main brushroll 11, so as to at least partially fill up and sweep the gaps between the main brushroll 11 and the brushroll chamber 12 and between the main brushroll 11 and the brushroll casing 13 (i.e. the gap between the first circumferential protrusion 112A and the top inner wall of the second recessed region 122 and between the first circumferential protrusion 112A and the bottom inner wall of the region outside of the first brushroll-casing baffle 131).
2. Side Brush Structure
In one or more illustrative embodiment, as shown in
In other words, a joint of the side brush 31 and the side-brush holder structure 32 may be located at the gap between the base 311 and the side-brush accommodating chamber 321. Besides the arrangement employed in the above embodiment, the third anti-winding structure 313 may be provided to the inner wall of the side-brush accommodating chamber 321 defined by the side-brush holder structure 32, i.e. one end of the third anti-winding structure 313 is fixed to the inner wall of the side-brush accommodating chamber 321, while the other end thereof faces the base 311, for example, touching and abutting against an outer wall of the base 311, whose working principle is similar to the above embodiment and hence will not be described in detail.
Meanwhile, the third anti-winding structure 313 may adopt the same soft materials in the above embodiment concerning “the main brushroll structure”, which will not be described in detail.
Alternatively or additionally, as shown in
The terminology used in the present disclosure is for the purpose of describing exemplary embodiments only and is not intended to limit the present disclosure. As used in the present disclosure and the appended claims, the singular forms “a,” “an” and “the” are intended to include the plural forms as well, unless the context clearly indicates otherwise. It shall also be understood that the terms “or” and “and/or” used herein are intended to signify and include any or all possible combinations of one or more of the associated listed items, unless the context clearly indicates otherwise.
It shall be understood that, although the terms “first,” “second,” “third,” etc. may be used herein to describe various information, the information should not be limited by these terms. These terms are only used to distinguish one category of information from another. For example, without departing from the scope of the present disclosure, first information may be termed as second information; and similarly, second information may also be termed as first information. As used herein, the term “if” may be understood to mean “when” or “upon” or “in response to” depending on the context.
Reference throughout this specification to “one embodiment,” “an embodiment,” “exemplary embodiment,” or the like in the singular or plural means that one or more particular features, structures, or characteristics described in connection with an embodiment is included in at least one embodiment of the present disclosure. Thus, the appearances of the phrases “in one embodiment” or “in an embodiment,” “in an exemplary embodiment,” or the like in the singular or plural in various places throughout this specification are not necessarily all referring to the same embodiment. Furthermore, the particular features, structures, or characteristics in one or more embodiments may be combined in any suitable manner.
Other embodiments of the present disclosure will be apparent to those skilled in the art from consideration of the specification and practice of the disclosure disclosed here. This application is intended to cover any variations, uses, or adaptations of the disclosure following the general principles thereof and including such departures from the present disclosure as come within known or customary practice in the art. It is intended that the specification and examples be considered as exemplary only, with a true scope and spirit of the present disclosure being indicated by the following claims.
It will be appreciated that the present disclosure is not limited to the exact construction that has been described above and illustrated in the accompanying drawings, and that various modifications and changes can be made without departing from the scope thereof. It is intended that the scope of the disclosure only be limited by the appended claims.
| Number | Date | Country | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| 201610232744.5 | Apr 2016 | CN | national |
This application is a Continuation Application of U.S. application Ser. No. 15/484,681 filed on Apr. 11, 2017, which is based on and claims priority to Chinese Patent Application No. 201610232744.5, filed on Apr. 14, 2016, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference for all purposes.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent | 15484681 | Apr 2017 | US |
| Child | 16931221 | US |
