Online Coverage Path Planning for a Mobile Robot Considering Energy Consumption

An efficient coverage path planning (CPP) algorithm for a mobile robot is required in particular for outdoor area cleaning and mowing tasks. CPP is impeded by a high number of possible solutions and dependency to environmental change, which require algorithms that enables to provide short computation time or run online while covering whole area. In addition, because a mobile robot has generally a limited battery capacity, an energy optimal solution is expected for outdoor tasks. This paper proposes two CPP algorithms that consider energy consumption of a mobile robot with/without knowledge of environment. Energy consumption, required motion time and path length, and computation time of the proposed algorithms are compared with two existing methods by simulation.