X-STC: An Extended Spanning Tree-based Coverage algorithm for mobile robots

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a simple extension to the spanning tree based coverage (STC) algorithm for a mobile robot. The proposed extended spanning tree based coverage (X-STC) algorithm attempts to cover even the partially occupied cells, unlike the spiral-STC, the basic STC algorithm. The properties of the X-STC algorithms are discussed and illustrated with examples. We compare the coverage performance of the proposed X-STC algorithm with two existing STC based algorithms, namely spiral-STC and full-STC. The results show that the proposed algorithm substantially improves the amount of coverage compared to that with the existing STC based algorithms.