Abstract

Number of studies about complete coverage has been increasing in the last five years. There are different approaches about complete coverage route planning for single and multi robot systems when the environment is known and static. But for the dynamic and unknown environments, methods for complete coverage by single or multi robot systems with limited sensor capabilities are few and they are in simulation stage. These methods are successful under certain assumptions and new methods are necessary to find solutions for more general conditions and/or real applications. In this project, methods will be developed for complete coverage route planning for the mobile robots having limited sensor capabilities. In route planning, existing models and solution methods in operational research will be used. In this respect, we plan to use route planning models such as traveling salesman problem and covering tour problem. Additionally, since these kind of problems are NP-hard, because finding the optimal solution of the problem is time consuming, is it planned to find effective solutions (routes) by using heuristic and/or meta-heuristic approaches. Main purpose is to develop a model such that robot(s) cover the entire region in the shortest time or distance and for this model developing effective solutions by heuristic and/or meta-heuristic approaches. Also we plan to develop an architecture which enables us to re-plan in the dynamic environments. Applications are planned for single and multi-robot systems for dynamic indoor environments.

Keywords

Mobile Robots, Covering Terrain, Sweeping Environments, Covering Tour Problem, Heuristic and Meta-heuristic Solution Methods

Fund

Funded by TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey)