Full Coverage of Confined Irregular Polygon Area for Marine Survey

This paper considers the coverage path planning (CPP) problem for marine surveys, where the survey vehicles' movements are confined in the irregular polygon search area. So this is a sort of milling problem [1] with the minimum number of turns in order for improvement of the acquired sonar image quality. For this purpose, this paper proposes a novel method called CbSPSA (calculation based shortest path search algorithm). Especially in the irregular corner area, this algorithm can easily calculate a kind of shortest path for its full coverage of this irregular area. For any given polygon, it can always be partitioned into convex polygon(s). In this paper, we only consider the case where these divided convex polygons are all connected one by one. In this case, the shortest path with minimum turns in each convex polygon can be easily searched by CbSPSA. And further by simply linking all of these pieces, the total coverage path for any given polygon area can be constructed. On the other hand, for a given polygon, usually there are several different cases of partition. Among the searched coverage paths for each of these different partitions, the final optimal coverage path is determined through a predefined criteria. Numerical simulation and analyses are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.