An optimization approach for planning robotic field coverage

Abstract

This paper presents an optimization approach that takes the vehicle's characteristics into account to minimize the non-working travel of mobile robots in coverage path planning. Since turns are often costly for mobile robots, minimizing the cost of turns usually produces more working efficiency. Prior researches on coverage path planning for mobile robots tend to fall into two complementary categories: (1) minimize the number of turns, by finding the optimal decomposition of a complex field into subfields and the optimal driving directions; (2) minimize the cost on a fixed number of turns, by finding the optimal visiting sequence of subfields and the optimal traversal sequence of parallel tracks for each subfield. This paper firstly presents a novel traversal pattern of parallel field tracks that belongs to the second category, then extends the proposed traversal pattern to connect with algorithms in the first category, providing a complete coverage path planning method for mobile robots. Experiments show that the proposed method can provide feasible solutions and the total wasted distance can be greatly reduced when compared against classical boustrophedon path or recent state-of-the-art.