On minimizing turns in robot coverage path planning | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

On minimizing turns in robot coverage path planning


Abstract:

In this paper we study sweep coverage path planning, in which a robot must cover all points in a workspace with its footprint. In many coverage applications, including cl...Show More

Abstract:

In this paper we study sweep coverage path planning, in which a robot must cover all points in a workspace with its footprint. In many coverage applications, including cleaning and monitoring, it is beneficial to use coverage paths with minimal robot turns. To address this, we provide an efficient method to compute the minimum altitude of a non-convex polygonal region, which captures the number of parallel line segments, and thus turns, needed to cover the region. Then, given a non-convex polygon, we provide a method to cut the polygon into two pieces that minimizes the sum of their altitudes. Given an initial convex decomposition of a workspace, we apply this method to iteratively re-optimize and delete cuts of the decomposition. Finally, we compute a coverage path of the workspace by placing parallel line segments in each region, and then computing a tour of the segments of minimum cost. We present simulation results on several workspaces with obstacles, which demonstrate improvements in both the number of turns in the final coverage path and runtime.
Date of Conference: 21-25 August 2016
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 17 November 2016
ISBN Information:
Electronic ISSN: 2161-8089
Conference Location: Fort Worth, TX, USA

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