Energy-Efficient Coverage Path Planning for General Terrain Surfaces

Journal article (2019)

Authors

Chenming Wu Tsinghua University

C. Dai Materials and Manufacturing -

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

C.C. Wang The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Research Group

Materials and Manufacturing () (TU Delft)

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

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

Published Date

2019

Language

English

Reuse Rights

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Faculty

Industrial Design Engineering

Department

Sustainable Design Engineering

Research Group

Materials and Manufacturing

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.

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