Semi-boustrophedon coverage with a Dubins vehicle

Abstract This paper addresses the problem of generating coverage paths (that is, paths that pass within some sensor footprint of every point in an environment) for vehicles with Dubins motion constraints. We extend previous work that solves this coverage problem as a traveling salesman problem (TSP) by introducing a practical heuristic algorithm to reduce runtime while maintaining near-optimal path length. Furthermore, we show that generating an optimal coverage path is NP-hard by reducing from the Exact Cover problem, which provides justification for our algorithm's conversion of Dubins coverage instances to TSP instances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the algorithm does indeed produce length paths comparable to optimal in significantly less time.

@inproceedings{LewEdw+17,
  author = {Jeremy S. Lewis and William Edwards and Kelly Benson and
            Ioannis Rekleitis and Jason M. O'Kane},
  booktitle = {Proc. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
               Robots and Systems},
  title = {Semi-bous\-trophedon coverage with a Dubins vehicle},
  year = {2017}
}