A Practical Coverage Algorithm for Intelligent Robots with Deadline Situations

Abstract

Coverage algorithm is one of the core technologies required for intelligent robots such as cleaning robots, harvesting robots, painting robots and lawn mowing robots. Although many smart coverage algorithms have been proposed, to the best of our knowledge, all of them make the same assumption that they have sufficient time to cover the entire target area. However, the time to completely cover the whole target area may not always be available. Therefore, in this paper, we propose another new coverage scheme, which we call the DmaxCoverage algorithm, that decides the coverage path by considering the deadline for coverage. This approach can be beneficial when the time for the coverage is not sufficient to cover the entire target area. Experimental results show that the DmaxCoverage algorithm outperforms previous algorithms for these situations.