ST-CTC: A spanning tree-based competitive and truly complete coverage algorithm for mobile robots

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new robot coverage algorithm using approximate cellular decomposition. While in most coverage algorithms using approximate cellular decomposition, only a resolution-complete coverage is achievable, the proposed algorithm achieves complete coverage in true sense by covering even partially occupied cells, with minimal (or no) overlapping/retracing of the path. The algorithm is implemented at graph level in Matlab. Further, the performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with that of STC and Competitive-STC, two representative approximate cellular decomposition based coverage algorithms reported in the literature. © 2015 ACM.