Coverage Path Planning: The Boustrophedon Decomposition

Abstract

Coverage path planning is the determination of a path that a robot must take in order to pass over each point in an environment. Applications include vacuuming, floor scrubbing, and inspection. We developed the boustrophedon cellular decomposition which is an exact cellular decomposition approach for the purposes of coverage. Each cell in the boustrophedon is covered with simple back and forth motions. Once each cell is covered then the entire environment is covered. Therefore, coverage is reduced to finding an exhaustive path through a graph which represents the adjacency relationships of the cells in the boustrophedon decomposition. This approach is provably complete and experiments on a mobile robot validate this approach.