Energy Constrained Online Coverage Path Planning with a Lower Bound For the Optimal Performance

Coverage path planning is a problem that is faced on a daily base by different robots varying from indoor cleaning robots to agricultural drones. These platforms are sometimes expected to cover previously unknown areas, which may be too large to cover with a single battery charge, requiring multiple visits to a charging or a tanking station. This paper proposes a new method for this energy constrained coverage path planning problem. The proposed approach derives from contour following, and it provides superior performance compared to the existing work in the literature. Additionally, environment topology independent bounds are derived for the minimum number of charges and energy consumed for the energy constrained coverage path planning problem.