On Complete Coverage Path Planning Algorithms for Non-holonomic Mobile Robots: Survey and Challenges

The problem of determining a collision free path within a region is an important area of research in robotics. One significant aspect of this problem is coverage path planning, which is a process to find a path that passes through each reachable position in the desired area. This task is fundamental to many robotic applications such as cleaning, painting, underwater operations, mine sweeping, lawn mowing, agriculture, monitoring, searching, and rescue operations. The total coverage time is significantly influenced by total number of turns, optimization of backtracking sequence, and smoothness in the complete coverage path. There is no comprehensive literature review on backtracking optimization and path smoothing techniques used in complete coverage path planning. Although the problem of coverage path planning has been addressed by many researchers. However, existing state of the art needs to be significantly improved, particularly in terms of accuracy, efficiency, robustness, and optimization. This paper aims to present the latest developments, challenges regarding backtracking sequence optimization, smoothness techniques, limitations of existing approaches, and future research directions.