CT-CPP: 3D Coverage Path Planning for Unknown Terrain Reconstruction using Coverage Trees
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This letter addresses the 3D coverage path planning (CPP) problem for terrain reconstruction of unknown obstacle rich environments. Due to sensing limitations, the proposed method, called CT-CPP, performs layered scanning of the 3D region to collect terrain data, where the traveling sequence is optimized using the concept of a coverage tree (CT). A modified TSP-based tree traversal strategy is proposed, and compared with breadth-first search (BFS) and depth-first search (DFS) methods, with TSP providing the shortest trajectory lengths. The CT-CPP method is validated on a high-fidelity underwater simulator and the results are evaluated in comparison to an existing terrain following CPP method (TF-CPP). The CT-CPP with TSP optimizer yields significant improvements in trajectory length, energy consumption, and reconstruction error.
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