Complete Coverage Path Planning Based on Ant Colony Algorithm

Abstract

The complete coverage path planning algorithm integrating local subarea coverage with global planning was proposed. According to the characteristic of Boustrophedon cellular decomposition, the robot covers local subarea through back and forth motion. The distance between every subareas was redefined, which including connectivity, least distance and number of obstacles between subareas. The new distance matrix of subareas in environment is built for global planning. Based on ant colony algorithm, the robot uses the distance matrix to get the optimization sequence of the subareas after decomposed the coverage environment. Experiments on a simulation of environment verify the validity of the proposed algorithm.