A Tromino Tiling Theoretic Approach to Path Planning in a Reconfigurable Floor Cleaning Robot

Abstract

Although the tiling theory has been examined in depth as a specific mathematics research division, to date, studies involving polyomino tiling theory have been largely restrained to the domains of animation, computer graphics, gaming, and packaging. This paper describes the application of a class of tiling theory, to a shapeshifting floor cleaning robot named hTromo. The platform that was developed in this study demonstrated the ability to generate the global tiling set required to cover a predefined space by leveraging on tiling theory of Tromino, which consists of three cells. Specifically, the application of three Tromino tiling theorems to an autonomous floor-cleaning robot was validated using the hTromo robot. The results of all experimental cases revealed that the application of the proposed technique resulted in high levels of area coverage. This paper presents an overview of the hTromo robot's system architecture together with a detailed description of the three Tromino tiling theorems that were tested in this study.