Towards Map Building and Space Coverage Planning in Robotics

This paper describes new method for building occupancy grid from single camera, automatic calibration of this method and approach how to use this internal representation for cleaning unknown environment. The algorithm is designed for indoor application. This assumption is used for calculating inverse perspective transformation of the gathered image. The paper brings an overview of path-planning methods targeted on complete coverage of an operating space. Two algorithms for planning coverage based on occupancy grid are outlined and their fundamental properties are compared. Firstly the existing approach to solution of the coverage problem based on cellular decomposition of the working space is discussed and further the method applies border expansion is introduced. Attached experiments verify and compare the newly designed and the existing methods as well as illustrate the final performance of the methods in real environments. Key-Words: Mobile robotics, environment mapping, occupancy grids, space coverage, motion planning