Coverage Path Planning of Mobile Robots Using Rational Quadratic Bézier Spline

The Complete Coverage Path Planning (CCPP) algorithm finds a collision free path while covering every accessible region within an environment. CCPP is fundamental to many real world robotic applications such as mine sweeping, cleaning, painting, surveillance, and agriculture field operations. The current state of the art coverage algorithms usually generate a linear path with sharp turns. Such a path is not suitable for non-holonomic mobile robots. This paper presents an offline complete coverage path smoothing technique for a mobile robot. The proposed approach focuses on smoothing the planned coverage path to increase coverage efficiency by reducing total operational time and energy consumption of the robot. The smooth trajectory is generated by using rational quadratic Bézier spline. An interactive algorithm is also proposed for avoiding collision during path smoothing process. The proposed approach ensures C1 continuous coverage suitable for slow speed maneuvering robots. The simulation results show that the proposed approach is computationally efficient for performing coverage task of a maneuvering robot.