An Optimized Cleaning Robot Path Generation and Execution System using Cellular Representation of Workspace

Many robot applications depend on solving the Complete Coverage Path Problem (CCPP). Specifically, robot vacuum cleaners have seen increased use in recent years, and some models offer room mapping capability using sensors such as LiDAR. With the addition of room mapping, applied robotic cleaning has begun to transition from random walk and heuristic path planning into an environment-aware approach. In this paper, a novel solution for pathfinding and navigation of indoor robot cleaners is proposed. The proposed solution plans a path from a priori cellular decomposition of the work environment. The planned path achieves complete coverage on the map and reduces duplicate coverage. The solution is implemented inside the ROS framework, and is validated with Gazebo simulation. Metrics to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm seek to evaluate the efficiency by speed, duplicate coverage and distance travelled.

CPC Algorithm: Exact Area Coverage by a Mobile Robot Using Approximate Cellular Decomposition

SUMMARY A new coverage path planning (CPP) algorithm, namely cell permeability-based coverage (CPC) algorithm, is proposed in this paper. Unlike the most CPP algorithms using approximate cellular decomposition, the proposed algorithm achieves exact coverage with lower coverage overlap compared to that with the existing algorithms. Apart from a formal analysis of the algorithm, the performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with two representative approximate cellular decomposition-based coverage algorithms reported in the literature. Results of demonstrative experiments on a TurtleBot mobile robot within the robot operating system/Gazebo environment and on a Fire Bird V robot are also provided.

GM-VPC: An Algorithm for Multi-robot Coverage of Known Spaces Using Generalized Voronoi Partition

SUMMARYIn this paper we address the problem of coverage path planning (CPP) for multiple cooperating mobile robots. We use a ‘partition and cover’ approach using Voronoi partition to achieve natural passive cooperation between robots to avoid task duplicity. We combine two generalizations of Voronoi partition, namely geodesic-distance-based Voronoi partition and Manhattan-distance-based Voronoi partition, to address contiguity of partition in the presence of obstacles and to avoid partition-boundary-induced coverage gap. The region is divided into 2D×2D grids, where D is the size of the robot footprint. Individual robots can use any of the single-robot CPP algorithms. We show that with the proposed Geodesic-Manhattan Voronoi-partition-based coverage (GM-VPC), a complete and non-overlapping coverage can be achieved at grid level provided that the underlying single-robot CPP algorithm has similar property.We demonstrated using two representative single-robot coverage strategies, namely Boustrophedon-decomposition-based coverage and Spanning Tree coverage, first based on so-called exact cellular decomposition and second based on approximate cellular decomposition, that the proposed partitioning scheme completely eliminates coverage gaps and coverage overlaps. Simulation experiments using Matlab and V-rep robot simulator and experiments with Fire Bird V mobile robot are carried out to validate the proposed coverage strategy.

Survey on Coverage Path Planning with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Coverage path planning consists of finding the route which covers every point of a certain area of interest. In recent times, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been employed in several application domains involving terrain coverage, such as surveillance, smart farming, photogrammetry, disaster management, civil security, and wildfire tracking, among others. This paper aims to explore and analyze the existing studies in the literature related to the different approaches employed in coverage path planning problems, especially those using UAVs. We address simple geometric flight patterns and more complex grid-based solutions considering full and partial information about the area of interest. The surveyed coverage approaches are classified according to a classical taxonomy, such as no decomposition, exact cellular decomposition, and approximate cellular decomposition. This review also contemplates different shapes of the area of interest, such as rectangular, concave and convex polygons. The performance metrics usually applied to evaluate the success of the coverage missions are also presented.

An analogue of Springer fibers in certain wonderful compactifications

We investigate the topological structure of a cellular decomposition of the fixed locus of a unipotent operator of regular Jordan type acting on the wonderful compactification of the variety of complete quadrics and the variety of complete skew forms. The Poincaré polynomial is computed in each case and the poset of cell closures under inclusion is described in the complete quadrics case.