Autonomous navigation of quadrupeds using coverage path planning with morphological skeleton maps

This article proposes a novel method of coverage path planning for the purpose of scanning an unstructured environment autonomously. The method uses the morphological skeleton of a prior 2D navigation map via SLAM to generate a sequence of points of interest (POIs). This sequence is then ordered to create an optimal path based on the robot's current position. To control the high-level operation, a finite state machine (FSM) is used to switch between two modes: navigating toward a POI using Nav2 and scanning the local surroundings. We validate the method in a leveled, indoor, obstacle-free, non-convex environment, evaluating time efficiency and reachability over five trials. The map reader and path planner can quickly process maps of widths and heights ranging between [196,225] $pixels$ and [185,231] $pixels$ in $2.52ms$ and $1.7ms$ , respectively. Their computation time increases with $22.0ns/pixel$ and 8.17 μs/pixel, respectively. The robot managed to reach 86.5% of all waypoints across the five runs. The proposed method suffers from drift occurring in the 2D navigation map.