Complete coverage path planning of mobile robots for humanitarian demining

The paper presents a path planning algorithm for a non-circular shaped mobile robot to autonomously navigate in an unknown area for humanitarian demining. For that purpose the path planning problem comes down to planning a path from some starting location to a final location in an area so that the robot covers all the reachable positions in the area while following the planned path. Based on our previous complete coverage algorithm of known areas we have developed a complete coverage algorithm capable of operating in unknown areas with known border dimensions. The proposed algorithm uses occupancy grid map representation of the area. Every free cell represents a node in the graph being searched to find the complete coverage path. The proposed algorithm finds the complete coverage path in the graph accounting for the dimensions of the mobile robot, where non-circular shaped robots can be easily included. The algorithm is implemented under the ROS (robot operating system) and tested in the stage 3D simulator for mobile robots.