AUTHOR=Becoy Alexander James , Khomenko Kseniia , Peternel Luka , Rajan Raj Thilak 

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

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Robotics and AI

VOLUME=Volume 12 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/robotics-and-ai/articles/10.3389/frobt.2025.1601862

DOI=10.3389/frobt.2025.1601862

ISSN=2296-9144

ABSTRACT=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 2.52 ms and 1.7 ms, respectively. 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 across the five runs. The proposed method suffers from drift occurring in the 2D navigation map.