A survey on coverage path planning for robotics

In this article the author analyzes the task of determining a path that covers the totality of an area or volume while avoiding obstacles. At the start the author denotes six requirements for path finding:

1- robot must move through all the points in the target area covering it completely.

2- robot must fill the region without overlapping paths.

3- continuous and sequential operation without any repetition of paths is required.

4- robot must avoid all obstacles.

5- simple motion trajectories (e.g., straight lines or circles) should be used (for simplicity in control).

6- an ‘‘optimal’’ path is desired under available conditions.

In the continuance of the article the author writes about different methods of approach to the issue starting off by: 1. classical exact cellular decomposition methods, which breaks the space into smaller simple, non-overlapping cells 2.morse-based cellular decomposition, which has the advantage to classical exact cellular methods because it can be handle non-polygonal shapes 3. Landmark-based topological coverage 4. Grid-based methods 5. Graph-based coverage 6. 3D coverage 7. Optimale Coverage 8. Coverage under uncertainty and 9. multi-robot method. In the end the author gives a summary in the form of a table:,