Space Filling Curves for Coverage Path Planning with Online Obstacle Avoidance

TL;DR

This paper introduces an online coverage path planning strategy using space-filling curves that adaptively avoids obstacles to ensure complete exploration of unknown regions.

Contribution

It proposes a novel online method combining space-filling curves with real-time obstacle avoidance for efficient coverage.

Findings

Strategy guarantees complete coverage despite obstacles.

Method adapts the path online based on obstacle encounters.

Proven completeness and effective in non-uniform coverage scenarios.

Abstract

The paper presents a strategy for robotic exploration problem using Space-Filling curves (SFC). The strategy plans a path that avoids unknown obstacles while ensuring complete coverage of the free space in region of interest. The region of interest is first tessellated, and the tiles/cells are connected using a SFC pattern. A robot follows the SFC to explore the entire area. However, obstacles can block the systematic movement of the robot. We overcome this problem by determining an alternate path online that avoids the blocked cells while ensuring all the accessible cells are visited at least once. The proposed strategy chooses next waypoint based on the graph connectivity of the cells and the obstacle encountered so far. It is online, exhaustive and works in situations demanding non-uniform coverage. The completeness of the strategy is proved and its desirable properties are discussed with examples.