Virtual door algorithm for coverage path planning of mobile robot

This paper presents a novel coverage path planning algorithm for a mobile robot in indoor environment. Overall region is divided into several sub-regions based on the virtually extracted doors. The key idea of this method was obtained from the usual way of dividing an indoor environment into sub-regions, i.e., rooms based on the identification of doors. The proposed virtual door algorithm extracts the virtual doors by overlapping a Generalized Voronoi Diagram (GVD) and a configuration space eroded by the half of the door size. The region to region cleaning algorithm is also proposed based on the closing and opening of virtual doors. The performance of our algorithm has been tested on various real indoor environments using a commercially available cleaning robot.