Abstract
Although the use of autonomous mobile robots in a known workspace has become increasingly popular, their application in an unknown workspace remains a challenge. This paper presents a sensor-based online cell decomposition method that is supported by online coverage; it allows a robot to simultaneously explore an unknown workspace and achieve adaptive cell decomposition to ensure the coverage of a non-rectilinear environment. Assumptions on the proposed method are established to obtain a viable solution. First, map building and position correction are simplified under the following assumptions. The workspace of the robot is non-rectilinear and structured, in which several convex obstacles are distributed. The orthogonality assumption follows the previous assumption. The orthogonality assumption posits that major structures of the indoor environment can be modeled by sets of lines and curves. Second, the decomposed cell must be as large as possible. Lastly, cells are composed by considering their adaptability to an explored map, that is, each cell is composed and updated until it is unchanged. The main process to construct cells is performed after a visibility map is built to guarantee that all visible maps have been seen by a mobile robot previously. The performance evolution of the proposed method is verified through an experiment.
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Dugarjav, B., Lee, SG., Quang, T.B. et al. Adaptive online cell decomposition with a laser range finder in unknown non-rectilinear environments. Int. J. Precis. Eng. Manuf. 18, 487–495 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12541-017-0059-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12541-017-0059-7