Virtual door-based coverage path planning for mobile robot

Abstract

This paper presents a novel coverage path planning method in indoor environment for a mobile robot such as cleaning robot. Overall region is divided into several sub-regions based on the virtually extracted doors. The algorithm is inspired from the usual way of dividing an indoor environment into sub-regions, i.e., rooms based on the identification of doors. The virtual door algorithm extracts the virtual doors by combining a Generalized Voronoi Diagram (GVD) and a configuration space eroded by the half of the door size. The region to region cleaning algorithm is also proposed based on the closing and opening operations of virtual doors. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been tested on various real indoor environments using a commercially available cleaning robot. © 2009 Springer.