Simultaneous exploration and coverage by a mobile robot

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a problem of simultaneous exploration and coverage for a mobile robot, combining the problems of area coverage with exploration and mapping. The primary task here is to completely cover an initially unknown region. Here we combine the advantages of online and off-line coverage path planning algorithms by using the exploration as an aid. The robots perform intermittent exploration during coverage in order to update the map of the environment, which in turn is used to generate the coverage path. We illustrate and demonstrate the problem using the off-line version of Spanning Tree Coverage algorithm with a frontier-based exploration strategy. The simulation results demonstrate that the robot successfully achieves complete and non-repetitive coverage. � 2020, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.