Yong-Jin Liu

Yong-Jin Liu

Yong-Jin Liu is a tenured Full Professor with the Computer Science Department at Tsinghua University. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in 2004 from Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. His research interests include computational geometry, computer graphics, computer aided design and pattern analysis.

Energy-Efficient Coverage Path Planning for General Terrain Surfaces

Published in ICRA, 2019

Abstract: This letter tackles the problem of energy-efficient coverage path planning for exploring general surfaces by an autonomous vehicle. Efficient algorithms are developed to generate paths on freeform 3-D surfaces according to a special design pattern as height extremity aware Fermat spiral for this purpose. By using the exact boundary-sourced geodesic distances, the method for generating Fermat spiral paths is first introduced to cover a general surface. Then, heuristics for energy efficiency are incorporated to add peak points of a height field as sources for geodesic computation. The paths generated by our method can significantly reduce the cost caused by gravity. Physical experiments have been taken on different terrain surfaces to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

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Recommended citation: Chenming Wu, Chengkai Dai, Xiaoxi Gong, Yong-Jin Liu, Jun Wang, Xianfeng Gu, Charlie C.L. Wang. Energy-Efficient Coverage Path Planning for General Terrain Surfaces. The 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2019), also published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 2584-2591 (joint submission to ICRA 2019 and RAL).