Title
Coverage path planning for legged robots in unknown environments
Abstract
In applications like search and rescue, industrial inspection, or construction site mapping, robots may be used to explore and map unknown areas using onboard sensing. This paper presents a novel coverage path planning (CPP) algorithm for autonomous exploration with legged robots. The algorithm decomposes the region of interest into cells by detecting landmarks in the environment. Each cell is covered using a zig-zag motion pattern. The landmark detection is based on the traversability information of the surrounding area. The detection mechanism can be applied to obstacles with any shape, and it is robust against measurement uncertainty. Unlike existing CPP algorithms, the proposed algorithm takes into account the traversability of the surrounding terrain, and it is applicable to rough terrain environments where obstacle detection is a non-trivial problem. Completeness of exploration and the trade off between completeness and efficiency are discussed. Two simulations of the proposed algorithm were conducted using the open source robotics simulator Gazebo, with the legged robot ANYmal [1] as robotic platform. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm for exploring unknown, rough terrain environments.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/SSRR.2016.7784279
2016 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR)
Keywords
Field
DocType
coverage path planning,legged robots,unknown environments,onboard sensing,obstacle detection,zig-zag motion pattern,landmark detection,Gazebo,open source robotics simulator
Motion planning,Computer vision,Obstacle,Open-source robotics,Search and rescue,Computer science,Simulation,Legged robot,Terrain,Artificial intelligence,Robot,Landmark
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
2374-3247
978-1-5090-4350-7
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
12
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dan Jia100.34
Martin Wermelinger263.13
Remo Diethelm3292.84
Philipp Krüsi4221.58
Marco Hutter546058.00