Abstract
Recent times are witnessing an emergence of sites that are hazardous for human access. This has created a global demand to equip agents with the ability to autonomously inspect such environments by computing a coverage path effectively and efficiently. However, inspection of such sites requires agents to consider the correlation of work, providing precedence provision in visiting regions. The current approaches to compute coverage path in the hazardous sites, however, do not consider precedence provision. To this end, coverage path planning strategies are proposed, which provide precedence provision. To meet the challenges, the problem is divided into two phases: inter-region and intra-region path planning. In the `inter-region' path planning of the approach, the site comprising of multiple disjoint regions is modelled as connectivity graph. Two novel approaches, Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) solution and heuristic based techniques, are proposed to generate the ordered sequence of regions to be traversed. In the `intra-region' path planning of the approach, each region is decomposed into a grid and Boustrophedon Motion is planned over each region. The ability of combined approach to provide complete coverage is proved under minor assumption. An investigative study has been conducted to elucidate the efficiency of the proposed approach in different scenarios using simulation experiments. The proposed approach is evaluated against baseline approaches. The results manifest a significant reduction in cost and execution time, which caters to inspection of target sites comprising of multiple disjoint regions with precedence provision.
Highlights
Agent based inspection of any site can be characterized as a coverage path planning (CPP) problem, where a path is derived, such that every single point of the environment is traversed
The advancement in science and technology has resulted in significant increase in the sites which can be characterized by multiple disjoint regions and require inclusion of precedence provision, due to the prevailing
The inspection of an extreme environment site has the following salient characteristics which need to be considered while computing coverage path: 1) Disjoint Regions: The precarious sites consist of regions which are spatially distributed and an agent is entrusted to cover each region
Summary
Agent based inspection of any site can be characterized as a coverage path planning (CPP) problem, where a path is derived, such that every single point of the environment is traversed. In other cases, where the agent was assigned to inspect any region [3], [12], the CPP problem was formulated as the derivation of the optimal path, so that one region was covered considering the precedence provision Another recent agent based post-disaster survey had proposed a variant of grid based TSP solution for systematic investigation of site with distributed regions [13]. The intended application of inspection requires agent to cover vast geographical areas, where both the number of regions and their average sizes may be pretty large This demands a heuristic solution where the coverage path planning problem of disjoint regions has been decomposed into two parts: 1) Inter-region.
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