Optimal Control for Constrained Coverage Path Planning

TL;DR

This paper proposes an optimized coverage path planning method for robots that maximizes area coverage while minimizing energy and time, considering environmental constraints and obstacles.

Contribution

It introduces an augmented linear sweep-based coverage method that achieves near-optimal coverage with respect to energy and time, and analyzes parameter effects on performance.

Findings

Enhanced coverage efficiency under constraints

Trade-offs between coverage, energy, and time analyzed

Parameter variations significantly impact performance

Abstract

The problem of constrained coverage path planning involves a robot trying to cover maximum area of an environment under some constraints that appear as obstacles in the map. Out of the several coverage path planning methods, we consider augmenting the linear sweep-based coverage method to achieve minimum energy/ time optimality along with maximum area coverage. In addition, we also study the effects of variation of different parameters on the performance of the modified method.