Entire region filling in indoor environments using neural networks

Entire region filling is a special type of robot path planning strategy that requires the mobile robot to cover every part of the whole workspace, which has many applications such as cleaning robots, vacuum cleaners, painter robots, land mine detectors, lawn mowers, and window cleaners. In this paper, a novel biologically inspired neural network approach is proposed for entire region filling with obstacle avoidance of a mobile cleaning robot in a nonstationary environment. The dynamics of each neuron in the topologically organized neural network is characterized by a shunting equation or an additive equation derived from Hodgkin and Huxley's (1952) membrane equation. There are only local lateral connections among neurons. Thus the computational complexity linearly depends on the neural network size. The robot path is autonomously generated from the dynamic activity landscape of the neural network and the previous robot location. The proposed model algorithm is computationally efficient. It can deal with an unstructured environment with irregular obstacles. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated by simulation results.