A Comprehensive Review of Coverage Path Planning in Robotics Using Classical and Heuristic Algorithms (original) (raw)

Deep Learning-Based Complete Coverage Path Planning With Re-Joint and Obstacle Fusion Paradigm

Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2022

With the introduction of autonomy into the precision agriculture process, environmental exploration, disaster response, and other fields, one of the global demands is to navigate autonomous vehicles to completely cover entire unknown environments. In the previous complete coverage path planning (CCPP) research, however, autonomous vehicles need to consider mapping, obstacle avoidance, and route planning simultaneously during operating in the workspace, which results in an extremely complicated and computationally expensive navigation system. In this study, a new framework is developed in light of a hierarchical manner with the obtained environmental information and gradually solving navigation problems layer by layer, consisting of environmental mapping, path generation, CCPP, and dynamic obstacle avoidance. The first layer based on satellite images utilizes a deep learning method to generate the CCPP trajectory through the position of the autonomous vehicle. In the second layer, an...

On Complete Coverage Path Planning Algorithms for Non-holonomic Mobile Robots: Survey and Challenges

J. Inf. Sci. Eng., 2017

The problem of determining a collision free path within a region is an important area of research in robotics. One significant aspect of this problem is coverage path planning, which is a process to find a path that passes through each reachable position in the desired area. This task is fundamental to many robotic applications such as cleaning, painting, underwater operations, mine sweeping, lawn mowing, agriculture, monitoring, searching, and rescue operations. The total coverage time is significantly influenced by total number of turns, optimization of backtracking sequence, and smoothness in the complete coverage path. There is no comprehensive literature review on backtracking optimization and path smoothing techniques used in complete coverage path planning. Although the problem of coverage path planning has been addressed by many researchers. However, existing state of the art needs to be significantly improved, particularly in terms of accuracy, efficiency, robustness, and o...

A solution to vicinity problem of obstacles in complete coverage path planning

Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292), 2002

In real world applications there exist arbitrarily shaped obstacles in the workspace during complete coverage path planning of cleaning robots. A cleaning robot should be able to sweep in a variety of corners and in the vicinity of arbitrarily shaped obstacles in an indoor environment. Consequently, the robot is required not only to effectively avoid the obstacles, but also to delicately cover every area in the vicinity of obstacles. In this paper, a solution to vicinity problem of obstacles in complete coverage path planning is proposed using neural-neighborhood analysis. The path planner is a biologically inspired neural network. The proposed model is capable of planning a real-time path to reasonably cover every area in the vicinity of obstacles. The robot path is autonomously generated through the dynamic neural activity landscape of the neural network and the previous robot location. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified through computer simulations. 612 0-7803-7272-7/02/$17.00

CPPNet: A Coverage Path Planning Network

2021

This paper presents a deep-learning based CPP algorithm, called Coverage Path Planning Network (CPPNet). CPPNet is built using a convolutional neural network (CNN) whose input is a graph-based representation of the occupancy grid map while its output is an edge probability heat graph, where the value of each edge is the probability of belonging to the optimal TSP tour. Finally, a greedy search is used to select the final optimized tour. CPPNet is trained and comparatively evaluated against the TSP tour. It is shown that CPPNet provides near-optimal solutions while requiring significantly less computational time, thus enabling real-time coverage path planning in partially unknown and dynamic environments.

A Neural Network Approach to Complete Coverage Path Planning

IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part B (Cybernetics), 2004

Complete coverage path planning requires the robot path to cover every part of the workspace, which is an essential issue in cleaning robots and many other robotic applications such as vacuum robots, painter robots, land mine detectors, lawn mowers, automated harvesters, and window cleaners. In this paper, a novel neural network approach is proposed for complete coverage path planning with obstacle avoidance of cleaning robots in nonstationary environments. The dynamics of each neuron in the topologically organized neural network is characterized by a shunting equation derived from Hodgkin and Huxley's (1952) membrane equation. There are only local lateral connections among neurons. The robot path is autonomously generated from the dynamic activity landscape of the neural network and the previous robot location. The proposed model algorithm is computationally simple. Simulation results show that the proposed model is capable of planning collision-free complete coverage robot paths.

Online complete coverage path planning using two-way proximity search

Intelligent Service Robotics, 2017

This paper presents an efficient online approach for complete coverage path planning of mobile robots in an unknown workspace based on online boustrophedon motion and an optimized backtracking mechanism. The presented approach first performs a single continuous boustrophedon motion until a critical point is reached. In order to completely cover the environment, next starting point is decided by using the accumulated knowledge of the environment map. An efficient backtracking technique based on proposed Two-way Proximity Search algorithm is used to plan a path from the critical point to the new starting point. Simulation results show the efficiency of proposed backtracking approach with improved total coverage time, coverage path length and memory requirements.

Pattern-Based Genetic Algorithm Approach to Coverage Path Planning for Mobile Robots

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009

Sensor-based mobile robot coverage path planning (MRCPP) problem is a challenging problem in robotic management. We here develop a genetic algorithm (GA) for MRCPP problems. The area subject to coverage is modeled with disks representing the range of sensing devices. Then the problem is defined as finding a path which runs through the center of each disk at least once with minimal cost of full coverage. The proposed GA utilizes prioritized neighborhood-disk information to generate practical and high-quality paths for the mobile robot. Prioritized movement patterns are designed to generate efficient rectilinear coverage paths with no narrow-angle turn; they enable GA to find optimal or near-optimal solutions. The results of GA are compared with a well-known approach called backtracking spiral algorithm (BSA). Experiments are also carried out using P3-DX mobile robots in the laboratory environment.

Optimizing coverage performance of multiple random path-planning robots

Paladyn, 2012

This paper presents a new approach to the multi-agent coverage path-planning problem. An e cient multi-robot coverage algorithm yields a coverage path for each robot, such that the union of all paths generates an almost full coverage of the terrain and the total coverage time is minimized. The proposed algorithm enables multiple robots with limited sensor capabilities to perform e cient coverage on a shared territory. Each robot is assigned to an exclusive route which enables it to carry out its tasks simultaneously, e.g., cleaning assigned floor area with minimal path overlapping. It is very di cult to cover all free space without visiting some locations more than once, but the occurrence of such events can be minimized with e cient algorithms. The proposed multi-robot coverage strategy directs a number of simple robots to cover an unknown area in a systematic manner. This is based on footprint data left by the randomized path-planning robots previously operated on that area. The developed path-planning algorithm has been applied to a simulated environment and robots to verify its e ectiveness and performance in such an application.

Fast and optimal branch-and-bound planner for the grid-based coverage path planning problem based on an admissible heuristic function

Frontiers in Robotics and AI

This paper introduces an optimal algorithm for solving the discrete grid-based coverage path planning (CPP) problem. This problem consists in finding a path that covers a given region completely. First, we propose a CPP-solving baseline algorithm based on the iterative deepening depth-first search (ID-DFS) approach. Then, we introduce two branch-and-bound strategies (Loop detection and an Admissible heuristic function) to improve the results of our baseline algorithm. We evaluate the performance of our planner using six types of benchmark grids considered in this study: Coast-like, Random links, Random walk, Simple-shapes, Labyrinth and Wide-Labyrinth grids. We are first to consider these types of grids in the context of CPP. All of them find their practical applications in real-world CPP problems from a variety of fields. The obtained results suggest that the proposed branch-and-bound algorithm solves the problem optimally (i.e., the exact solution is found in each case) orders of ...

Coverage Path Planning for Decomposition Reconfigurable Grid-Maps Using Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Travelling Salesman Problem

IEEE Access, 2020

Optimizing the coverage path planning (CPP) in robotics has become essential to accomplish efficient coverage applications. This work presents a novel approach to solve the CPP problem in large complex environments based on the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) leveraging the grid-based maps. The proposed algorithm applies the cellular decomposition methods to decompose the environment and generate the coverage path by recursively solving each decomposed cell formulated as TSP. A solution to TSP is determined by training Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) layers using Reinforcement Learning (RL). We validated the proposed method by systematically benchmarked with other conventional methods in terms of path length, execution time, and overlapping rate under four different map layouts with various obstacle density. The results depict that the proposed method outperforms all considered parameters than the conventional schemes. Moreover, simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach is scalable to the larger grid-maps and guarantees complete coverage with efficiently generated coverage paths. INDEX TERMS Coverage path planning, cellular reconfigurable decomposition, deep reinforcement learning, recurrent neural network, travelling salesman problem.