An online complete coverage approach for a team of robots in unknown environments

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to deal with the online complete coverage problem for a team of robots in unknown environments. In our approach each robot covers an unvisited region using a single boustrophedon motion until a robot reaches an ending point, which is surrounded by covered positions or obstacles. At the ending point the robot detects backtracking points based on the accumulated knowledge, plans the shortest backtracking path to the next starting point based on the proposed Theta* with multi-goals. Then, it follows the planed path to the next starting point to cover the next unvisited region. The robot team finishes the coverage task when no backtracking point is detected. Computer simulations show that our proposed approach is efficient for the complete coverage task of a robot team in terms of the coverage rate and the coverage path length.