Complete coverage path planning of mobile robots for humanitarian demining

Abstract

The paper presents a path planning algorithm for a non-circular shaped mobile robot to autonomously navigate in an unknown area for humanitarian demining. For that purpose the path planning problem comes down to planning a path from some starting location to a final location in an area so that the robot covers all the reachable positions in the area while following the planned path. In robotics literature this problem is called the complete coverage of an area. Without knowing the map of the area or with incomplete map information this problem also refers to the exploration of unknown areas, where the robot needs to incrementally build the area map and calculate new paths in order to complete its exploration task. Based on our previous complete coverage algorithm of known areas we have developed a complete coverage algorithm capable of operating in unknown areas with known border dimensions. The proposed algorithm uses occupancy grid map representation of the area. Every free cell represents a node in the graph being searched to find the complete coverage path. The proposed algorithm finds the complete coverage path in the graph accounting for the dimensions of the mobile robot, where non-circular shaped robots can be easily included. The complete coverage path is followed by the dynamic window algorithm, which includes robot's kinematic and dynamic constraints. The algorithms are implemented under the ROS (robot operating system) and tested in the stage 3D simulator for mobile robots.

Coverage Path Planning Techniques for Inspection of Disjoint Regions With Precedence Provision

“…CPP is integral to many robotics applications, such as painter robots [15], vacuum cleaning robots [16], autonomous underwater vehicles [17], demining robots [18] and precision agriculture [19]. However, most applications of CPP have considered computation of the coverage path for a single region in the past.…”

Smooth Complete Coverage Trajectory Planning Algorithm for a Nonholonomic Robot

“…The task of a Complete Coverage Path Planning (CCPP) algorithm is to generate such a path for a mobile robot that ensures that the robot completely covers the entire environment while following the planned path. There are many real-world applications that require a CCPP algorithm, such as floor cleaning [ 1 , 2 , 3 ], demining [ 4 , 5 ], automated harvesting [ 6 ], lawn mowing [ 7 ], autonomous underwater exploration [ 8 , 9 ], etc. To achieve efficient coverage in these applications, the planned path must satisfy some requirements, where the most important ones are maximizing the coverage rate, minimizing the complete coverage time, path length, overlap area, and energy consumption of the robot, and rapid path replanning if the environment changes during the execution of the coverage task.…”

Graph Theory-Based Approach to Accomplish Complete Coverage Path Planning Tasks for Reconfigurable Robots

“…Complete Coverage Path Planning (CCPP) algorithms focus on the task of determining a path that passes through every region in the workspace while avoiding obstacles. These algorithms have been extensively studied and many have been integrated to a wide range of real-world robotic platforms, such as cleaning robots [1], painter robots [2], demining robots [3], [4], lawnmowers [5], [6], and so forth.…”