An art gallery-based approach to autonomous robot motion planning in global environments

In this paper, we present a novel art gallery-based algorithm for placing a small number of guards to cover a global environment with obstacles for an autonomous robot. The guards are required to cover the entire workspace that is represented as a simple polygon with n vertices and h holes (obstacles). The proposed algorithm efficiently computes a (small) number of guards in simple polygons with holes, which runs in O (n log n) time and requires a linear storage complexity. However, an additional set of connection nodes is computed to form the connectivity graph, which contains all guards. This graph has far less number of vertices when compared to similar data structures used in conventional visibility-based or probabilistic-based motion planning algorithms. The resulting placement of guards and connectors can then be used as control points in the path of an autonomous mobile robot for navigation or inspection tasks. The proposed algorithm is not only offering a better performance in terms of computational cost but also an easy implementation. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency, robustness, and potential of the proposed algorithm.