Abstract
Due to the rapid technological and scientific development, in recent years, unmanned
vehicles are being used in several application domains, such as mapping, agriculture
and deep-sea exploration. Although autonomous vehicles provide a solution to a
number of problems, new problems that need to be solved are coming to the surface.
One of the most important problems of unmanned vehicles is the problem of finding a
path that covers the entire area of interest in a predefined environment while avoiding
obstacles. This problem is also known as Coverage Path Planning (CPP).
Even though many research works have been focused on solving the CPP problem
in 2D environments, the CPP problem in 3D environments has not attracted considerable
attention. Furthermore, other issues such as energy, speed and data capacity are often
not taken into account.
Taking into account the importance of CPP of autonomous vehicles and the lack
of CPP software, we have developed a methodology and a tool for optimal routing
of autonomous vehicles. The inputs of the tool include a three dimensional array
describing the area of interest as well as information regarding vehicle characteristics
(such as starting position, speed, total energy and storage). Our tool produces the
route that each vehicle will follow in order to cover the area of interest. The path
produced is tailored to each vehicle based on its characteristics.
Keywords: Coverage Path Planning, CPP, autonomous vehicle, 3D Coverage Path
Planning
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