Constructing visibility graph and planning optimal path for inspection of 2D workspace

Abstract

In this paper, we address the solution of solving the following problem: given a known workspace and a robot with limited sensors compute a short path for the vehicle so that every space in the workspace could be detected by the limited sensor of mobile robot on at least one point of the path. Visibility constraints including range of distance and angle of incidence are taken into consideration to model the real sensors with the view of 360 degrees. Instead of setting a number of guard location points for robot to travel, we here propose a concept called the visibility hallway which is constructed from the valid range of sensor. Our problem could be solved by two steps: we first construct the visibility graph according to the visibility hallway and then the path planner compute the short path from visibility graph with some specifications. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method could compute the path efficiently and the workspace could be inspected everywhere.