ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Field Robotics
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2025.1601862
This article is part of the Research TopicIntelligent Autonomous Robots: Enhancing Adaptability and Resilience in Complex EnvironmentsView all articles
Autonomous Navigation of Quadrupeds Using Coverage Path Planning with Morphological Skeleton Map
Provisionally accepted
- Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
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This paper proposes a novel method of coverage path planning for the purpose of scanning an unstructured environment autonomously. The method uses the morphological skeleton of the 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 given the robot's current position. To control the high-level operation, a finite state machine is used to switch between two modes: navigating towards a POI using Nav2, and scanning the local surroundings. We validate the method in a leveled indoor obstacle-free non-convex environment on time efficiency and reachability over five trials. The map reader and the path planner can quickly process maps of width and height ranging between [196,225] pixels and [185,231] pixels in 2.52 ms and 1.7 ms, respectively, where their computation time increases with 22.0 ns/pixel and 8.17 µs/pixel, respectively. The robot managed to reach 86.5 % of all waypoints over all five runs. The proposed method suffers from drift occurring in the 2D navigation map.
Keywords: Quadruped, Autonomous navigation, Unstructured environment, Coverage path planning, ROS 2
Received: 28 Mar 2025; Accepted: 04 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Becoy, Khomenko, Peternel and Rajan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Luka Peternel, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
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