Autonomous navigation of quadrupeds using coverage path planning with morphological skeleton maps
This article proposes a novel method of coverage path planning for the purpose of scanning an unstructured environment autonomously. The method uses the morphological skeleton of a prior 2D navigation map via SLAM to generate a sequence of points of interest (POIs). This sequence is then ordered to...
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2025-07-01
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| Series: | Frontiers in Robotics and AI |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2025.1601862/full |
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| Summary: | This article proposes a novel method of coverage path planning for the purpose of scanning an unstructured environment autonomously. The method uses the morphological skeleton of a prior 2D navigation map via SLAM to generate a sequence of points of interest (POIs). This sequence is then ordered to create an optimal path based on the robot’s current position. To control the high-level operation, a finite state machine (FSM) is used to switch between two modes: navigating toward a POI using Nav2 and scanning the local surroundings. We validate the method in a leveled, indoor, obstacle-free, non-convex environment, evaluating time efficiency and reachability over five trials. The map reader and path planner can quickly process maps of widths and heights ranging between [196,225] pixels and [185,231] pixels in 2.52 ms and 1.7 ms, respectively. Their computation time increases with 22.0 ns/pixel and 8.17 μs/pixel, respectively. The robot managed to reach 86.5% of all waypoints across the five runs. The proposed method suffers from drift occurring in the 2D navigation map. |
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| ISSN: | 2296-9144 |