Toward complete area coverage of a reconfigurable tiling robot by following obstacle shape

Abstract

AbstractComplete area coverage is a crucial factor for a floor cleaning robot. Self-reconfigurable tiling robots have been introduced over robots with a fixed shape for floor cleaning since they improve the area coverage by the flexibility of shape-shifting in cluttered environments. The existing coverage methods of reconfigurable tiling robots follow the tiling theory to cope with the area coverage problem. However, these methods merely consider a limited set of predefined shapes for the reconfiguration of a robot. The consideration of a limited set of predefined shapes for the reconfiguration impedes the ability of coverage to a certain extent in typical floor environments. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel method to improve area coverage of a tiling robot by reconfiguring according to the shape of obstacles. To this end, the required hinge angles for reconfiguring per the shape of an obstacle are determined by a genetic algorithm. The proposed method considers an optimized shape for reconfiguration in lieu of a limited set of predefined shapes. The coverage improvement of the proposed concept has been compared against the existing coverage methods of tiling robots to validate the performance. According to the experimental results, the proposed method surpasses the existing coverage methods of tiling robots from the perspective of area coverage, and the improvement is significant and noteworthy.