Sensor-Based Terrain Acquisition: a "Seed Spreader" Strategy

The problem of terrain acquisition presents one aspect of the more general problem of automatic motion planning in the presence of obstacles. In turn, there is a number of ways to formulate the terrain acquisition problem. We consider a case whereby a mobile robot is required to cover all reachable areas of a finite-size planar terrain populated with a finite number of obstacles of arbitrary shape. The robot is equipped with a “vision” which delivers coordinates of all visible obstacles within a limited radius (radius of vision). The proposed algorithm guarantees convergence and exhibits an upper bound performance quadratic in the perimeters of obstacles in the terrain.