Abstract
Completed area coverage planning (CACP) plays an essential role in various fields of robotics, such as area exploration, search, rescue, security, cleaning, and maintenance. Tiling robots with the ability to change their shape is a feasible solution to enhance the ability to cover predefined map areas with flexible sizes and to access the narrow space constraints. By dividing the map into sub-areas with the same size as the changeable robot shapes, the robot can plan the optimal movement to predetermined locations, transform its morphologies to cover the specific area, and ensure that the map is completely covered. The optimal navigation planning problem, including the least changing shape, shortest travel distance, and the lowest travel time while ensuring complete coverage of the map area, are solved in this paper. To this end, we propose the CACP framework for a tiling robot called hTrihex with three honeycomb shape modules. The robot can shift its shape into three different morphologies ensuring coverage of the map with a predetermined size. However, the ability to change shape also raises the complexity issues of the moving mechanisms. Therefore, the process of optimizing trajectories of the complete coverage is modeled according to the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) problem and solved by evolutionary approaches Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). Hence, the costweight to clear a pair of waypoints in the TSP is defined as the required energy shift the robot between the two locations. This energy corresponds to the three operating processes of the hTrihex robot: transformation, translation, and orientation correction. The CACP framework is verified both in the simulation environment and in the real environment. From the experimental results, proposed CACP capable of generating the Pareto-optimal outcome that navigates the robot from the goal to destination in various workspaces, and the algorithm could be adopted to other tiling robot platforms with multiple configurations.
Highlights
Tiling robots executing the regular and tedious tasks in the cleaning and maintenance industry have arisen significantly
Considering each tile, the three modules with hexagonal shapes marked as M1, M2, M3 can be located in different orders according to the arrangements of robot hinges; these create the options for robot center of the robot’s mass (COM) and change the route of Completed area coverage planning (CACP) inside the workspace
The CACP frameworks were verified to yield the least costweight in simulated workspaces and the optimal energy consumption in the real environments
Summary
Tiling robots executing the regular and tedious tasks in the cleaning and maintenance industry have arisen significantly. The CACP focuses on generating the global path planner to maximize the space visited by tiling robots inside the defined working environments This task involves trajectory generating and obstacle avoidance to cover the whole area in the considerations of a safe journey, effective energy consumption, and time saving. Changing shape helps to link the predefined tilesets from source to destination with the shortest optimal path, which ensures the complete coverage, saves the navigation energy and time To this end, a shape-shifting strategy was proposed in our previous works [19,20] for the novel robot named hTetro. The generation of the tileset and the robot’s coverage process was executed by manual supports without any motion planning strategies Another previous work proposed a reconfigurable Polyiamond shape-based robot with four blocks have given seven shape-shifting mechanisms [21].
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