Online Exploration and Coverage Planning in Unknown Obstacle-Cluttered Environments

Online coverage planning can be useful in applications like field monitoring and search and rescue. Without prior information of the environment, achieving resolution-complete coverage considering the non-holonomic mobility constraints in commonly-used vehicles (e.g., wheeled robots) remains a chall...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 5; no. 4; pp. 5969 - 5976
Main Authors Kan, Xinyue, Teng, Hanzhe, Karydis, Konstantinos
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Piscataway IEEE 01.10.2020
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects
Algorithms
Computer simulation
Exploration
Mobile robots
Nonholonomic motion planning
online coverage planning
Planning
Robot kinematics
Robot sensing systems
robotics in agriculture and forestry
Robots
Task analysis
Turning
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Summary:Online coverage planning can be useful in applications like field monitoring and search and rescue. Without prior information of the environment, achieving resolution-complete coverage considering the non-holonomic mobility constraints in commonly-used vehicles (e.g., wheeled robots) remains a challenge. In this letter, we propose a hierarchical, hex-decomposition-based coverage planning algorithm for unknown, obstacle-cluttered environments. The proposed approach ensures resolution-complete coverage, can be tuned to achieve fast exploration, and plans smooth paths for Dubins vehicles to follow at constant velocity in real-time. Gazebo simulations and hardware experiments with a non-holonomic wheeled robot show that our approach can successfully tradeoff between coverage and exploration speed and can outperform existing online coverage algorithms in terms of total covered area or exploration speed according to how it is tuned.
ISSN:2377-3766
2377-3766
DOI:10.1109/LRA.2020.3010455