A survey on coverage path planning for robotics

Abstract

Coverage Path Planning (CPP) is the task of determining a path that passes over all points of an area or volume of interest while avoiding obstacles. This task is integral to many robotic applications, such as vacuum cleaning robots, painter robots, autonomous underwater vehicles creating image mosaics, demining robots, lawn mowers, automated harvesters, window cleaners and inspection of complex structures, just to name a few. A considerable body of research has addressed the CPP problem. However, no updated surveys on CPP reflecting recent advances in the field have been presented in the past ten years. In this paper, we present a review of the most successful CPP methods, focusing in the achievements made in the past decade. Furthermore, we discuss reported field applications of the described CPP methods. This work aims to become a starting point for researchers who are initiating their endeavors in CPP. Likewise, this work aims to present a comprehensive review of the recent breakthroughs in the field, providing links to the most interesting and successful works.

A Cognitive Agent-based Model for Multi-Robot Coverage at a City Scale

“…An extensive survey of exploration and coverage approaches using a multi-robotic system has been presented in Julia et al (2012) and Galceran and Carreras (2013).…”

Complete Coverage Path Planning for a Multi-UAV Response System in Post-Earthquake Assessment

“…For example Equation (18) ensures that the travel in the upward (up) direction from i to j is zero unless i − 1 is less than or equal j. The travel from one square to its right square must be impossible for the up, down, and left directions and it is shown in Equation (21).…”

“…In CTP there are two types of nodes, those that must be visited by the tour and those that must be covered i.e., it lies within a pre-defined distance from a vertex of the tour [19]. Choset [20] and Galceran and Carreras [21] conducted comprehensive surveys on CPP methods, algorithms, and recent advances.…”

“…In addition, a distinct study [27] introduced the multi-robot boundary coverage problem with the application of inspection of blade surfaces inside a turbine. Furthermore, Galceran and Carreras [21] conducted a comprehensive survey on CPP.…”

A Memetic Algorithm With Variable Length Chromosome for Robot Path Planning Under Dynamic Environments

“…Path planning is one of the hot spots in the field of mobile robots, which means finding an optimal or near optimal collision-free path from the starting position to the target position in an environment with obstacles [1][2][3][4]. There have been various methods used for robot path planning, and the classical methods include artificial potential field methods [5], grid map representation methods [6] visibility graph methods [7].…”