7 - Coverage Path Planning (CPP): Maximal area coverage

Abstract

The coverage path planning (CPP) problem is determining a path that passes over all the points of an area or volume of interest while avoiding obstacles. Such a path planner falls under the exhaustive area coverage paradigm where visiting everywhere is of utmost importance. This is useful for applications like vacuum cleaning, window cleaning, demining, mowing, harvesting, etc., using mobile robots. This chapter presents several lines of work in this setting, spanning wireless sensing, combinatorics, and robotics.