Advancing an efficient coverage path planning in robots set up for application such as cleaning, painting and mining are becoming more crucial. Such drive in the coverage path planning field proposes numerous techniques over the past few decades. However, the proposed approaches were only applied and tested with a fixed morphological robot in which the coverage performance was significantly degraded in a complex environment. To this end, an A-star based zigzag global planner for a novel self-reconfigurable Tetris inspired cleaning robot (hTetro) presented in this paper. Unlike the traditional A-star algorithm, the presented approach can generate waypoints in order to cover the narrow spaces while assuming appropriate morphology of the hTtero robot with the objective of maximizing the coverage area. We validated the efficiency of the proposed planning approach in the Robot Operation System (ROS) Based simulated environment and tested with the hTetro robot in real-time under the controlled scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed coverage path planning approach resulting in superior area coverage performance in all considered experimental scenarios.
Keywords: area coverage; feature mapping; floor cleaning robot; path planning; reconfigurable mechanism.