As mobile robots become increasingly autonomous over extended periods of time, opportunities arise for their use on repetitive tasks. We define and implement behaviors for a class of such tasks that we call emphcontinuous area sweeping tasks. A continuous area sweeping task is one in which a robot (or group of robots) must repeatedly visit all points in a fixed area, possibly with non-uniform frequency, as specified by a task-dependent performance criterion. Examples of problems that need continuous area sweeping are trash removal in a large building and routine surveillance. We present a formulation for this problem and an initial algorithm to address it. The approach is analyzed analytically and is fully implemented and tested, both in simulation and on a physical robot.

PDF, PS, HTML

In The 12th International Conference on Advanced Robotics, July 2005.

@InProceedings{ICAR05, title={Continuous Area Sweeping: A Task Definition and Initial Approach}, author={Mazda Ahmadi and Peter Stone}, booktitle={The 12th International Conference on Advanced Robotics}, month={July}, url="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab?ICAR05", year={2005} }