Path Planning for Complete and Efficient Coverage Operation of Mobile Robots

Abstract

This paper presents a complete and efficient coverage path planning method for mobile robots. Its applications include robots for de-mining, cleaning, painting and so on. When a mobile robot performs area coverage task, completeness and efficiency of coverage are important factors. To achieve completeness easily, we adopt a divide and conquer strategy. We developed a novel cell decomposition algorithm that divides a given area into several cells. To achieve efficiency, each cell is covered by a robot motion that requires minimum time to cover the cell. The effectiveness of the method is verified using simulations.