Real-time area-covering operations with obstacle avoidance for cleaning robots

An area-covering operation is a kind of complete coverage path planning, which requires the robot path to cover every part of the workspace, which is an essential issue in cleaning robots and many other robotic applications such as vacuum robots, painter robots, land mine detectors, lawn mowers, and windows cleaners. In this paper, a novel biologically inspired neural network approach is proposed for complete coverage path planning with obstacle avoidance of a 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 proposed model algorithm is computationally efficient, and can also deal with changing environment. Simulation results show that the proposed model is capable of planning collision-free complete coverage robot path.