Energy-Efficient Coverage Path Planning for General Terrain Surfaces

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Energy-Efficient Coverage Path Planning for General Terrain Surfaces

Journal Article (2019)

Author(s)

Chenming Wu (Tsinghua University)

Chengkai Dai (TU Delft - Industrial Design Engineering)

Xiaoxi Gong (Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics)

Yong-Jin Liu (Tsinghua University)

Jun Wang (Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics)

Xianfeng David Gu (Stony Brook University)

Charlie C.L. Wang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Research Group

Materials and Manufacturing

Energy and environment-aware automation Field robots Motion and path planning

DOI related publication

https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2019.2899920 Final published version

To reference this document use

https://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:69ed8b15-6c1b-4085-be15-a03d45c2c5af

More Info

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Publication Year

2019

Language

English

Research Group

Materials and Manufacturing

Issue number

3

Volume number

4

Article number

8643385

Pages (from-to)

2584-2591

Downloads counter

268

Abstract

This letter tackles the problem of energy-efficient coverage path planning for exploring general surfaces by an autonomous vehicle. Efficient algorithms are developed to generate paths on freeform 3-D surfaces according to a special design pattern as height extremity aware Fermat spiral for this purpose. By using the exact boundary-sourced geodesic distances, the method for generating Fermat spiral paths is first introduced to cover a general surface. Then, heuristics for energy efficiency are incorporated to add peak points of a height field as sources for geodesic computation. The paths generated by our method can significantly reduce the cost caused by gravity. Physical experiments have been taken on different terrain surfaces to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.