Boustrophedon

Abstract: Coverage path planning is the determination of a path that a robot must take in order to pass over each point in an environment. Applications include de-mining, floor scrubbing, and inspection. We developed the boustrophedon cellular decomposition, which is an exact cellular decomposition approach, for the purposes of coverage. Essentially, the boustrophedon decomposition is a generalization of the trapezoidal decomposition that could allow for non-polygonal obstacles, but also has the side effect of having more “efficient” coverage paths than the trapezoidal decomposition. Each cell in the boustrophedon decomposition is covered with simple back and forth motions. Once each cell is covered, then the entire environment is covered. Therefore, coverage is reduced to finding an exhaustive path through a graph which represents the adjacency relationships of the cells in the boustrophedon decomposition. This approach is provably complete and experiments on a mobile robot validate this approach.

Abstract: In the store-rooms of the British Museum is kept a fragment belonging to a lead plaque which bears the traces of an inscription written boustrophedon in the Corinthian alphabet. This lead plaque was part of the collection of J. Woodhouse, which was made in Corfu, and following the death of the collector in 1866 was bequeathed to the British Museum. In 1868 the plaque was catalogued and described in the Museum's Register. According to a sketch, also included, it is clear that at that time more of it was preserved and that besides the upper and lower edge possibly the right end was also retained. It was described as containing seven lines of a boustrophedon inscription, of which only the first, second, and seventh lines were transcribed. The inscription was incomprehensible, and that may have been the reason for its not being published hitherto.

Abstract: This paper presents an online complete coverage algorithm for cleaning robots based on boustrophedon motions combined with A* search algorithm In our approach, while performing a boustrophedon motion to cover an unvisited area in the workspace, the robot detects and stores backtracking points To execute the next boustrophedon motion, A* search is employed as a backtracking mechanism which guides the robot to the nearest backtracking point Experimental results prove that the proposed algorithm ensures the complete coverage of the workspace in the finite moving steps of the robot Furthermore, our proposed approach is efficient in terms of the covered path length and the number of boustrophedon motions