A robotized interior work process planning algorithm based on surface minimum coverage set

Abstract

Interior finishing requires high labor intensity and finishing materials are harmful to workers during the processes, especially the one of wall surface disposal. In order to reduce labor costs and protect the health of workers, applying autonomous interior finishing robots in the wall surface disposal process will be a reasonable choice. In the application of an autonomous interior finishing robot, the path taken by the robot must be planned carefully considering that indoor environments can be very complicated. In addition, different from mobile manipulators, a mobile interior finishing robot has to access larger working space and be able to apply large force to the walls, ceilings. Thus they have to be used in a way similar to mobile crane. That is in order to guarantee stability, in each working station, mechanical stands will be released to support the platform. After finishing required processes, the stands have to be retrieved to move to the next working position. For an interior finishing robot working in this way, it needs to determine the optimal plan to minimize the times of working position change. In this paper, a method based on a minimal cover set of the planar surface is proposed for this purpose. With the derived robot moving plan with minimized steps, the whole moving sequence of the robotic interior finishing unit is determined with Genetic algorithm. The work area needed to be finished in each working position is then divided by using Voronoi graph.