Multi-Regional Coverage Path Planning for Robots with Energy Constraint

Coverage path planning (CPP) has been extensively studied in the literature, which is a key step to realize robotic applications that require complete coverage of a region, such as lawn mowing, room cleaning, land assessment, search and rescue. However, CPP for multiple regions has gained much less attention, which arises in many real scenarios. This multiregional CPP problem can be considered as a variant of the traveling salesman problem (TSP) enhanced with CPP, namely TSP-CPP. In this paper, we extend our previous investigation on the TSP-CPP problem to further consider the energy constraint of the robots. As the constrained TSP-CPP problem has an NP-Hard computational complexity, a stepwise selection based heuristic algorithm is developed to solve the problem. Simulation experiments and comparison studies show the good performance of the proposed algorithm in balancing optimality and efficiency.