Simulated Path Planning for Auburn’s Autonomous Lawnmower

Auburn University has a competition Autonomous Lawnmower team and competes every year at ION’s competition [1] in Dayton, OH. This paper describes the how the team has approached coverage path planning for the lawnmower given the competition constraints. The competition setting dictates a closed polygon filed, which can be concave, and it will contain several static and dynamic obstacles. The path planner for the lawnmower has to navigate this field while covering as much as the field as possible and without competition field specific knowledge. The algorithm implemented here have results that resemble the output of the Boustrophedon Cellular Decomposition [2] method. The paper describes the implementation of this algorithm and some examples of its performance in different situations. Additionally, the paper shows the simulation environment setup in the two dimensional, kinematic robotics simulator, Stage [3].