Coverage path planning based on a multiple sweep line decomposition

Coverage path planning determines a path that guides an autonomous vehicle to pass every part of a workspace completely and efficiently. Since turns are often costly for autonomous vehicles, minimizing the number of turns usually produces more working efficiency. This paper presents an optimization approach to minimize the number of turns of autonomous vehicles in coverage path planning. For complex polygonal fields, the problem is reduced to finding the optimal decomposition of the original field into simple subfields. The optimization criterion is minimization of the sum of widths of these decomposed subfields. Here, a new algorithm is designed based on a multiple sweep line decomposition. The time complexity of the proposed algorithm is O(n² log n). Experiments show that the proposed algorithm can provide nearly optimal solutions very efficiently when compared against recent state-of-the-art. The proposed algorithm can be applied for both convex and non-convex fields.