OPTIMIZING PYRAMID VISIBILITY COVERAGE FOR AUTONOMOUS ROBOTS IN 3D ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

This paper studies the optimal visibility coverage for autonomous robots in complex 3D environments. When a robot equipped with a range sensor is sent to inspect a 3D region, we want the complete visual coverage on the entire region using smallest number of scans. The practical sensor equipped on the robot usually has a pyramidshaped visible range with restricted scanning distance and angle. Finding the optimal pyramid visibility coverage of a 3D region is NP hard. In this paper we present an efficient computation algorithm to find a good approximate solution. Our framework allows the user to flexibly specify a coverage rate parameter to balance the percentage of visibility and the required guarding points for the given region. The algorithm is assessed in a simulated 3D pipeline environment for the detection of leak, clog, and deformation.