The Paintbrush Coverage Problem
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-1-2021
Abstract
Autonomous vehicles become more and more popular in our daily life. Mobile computing schemes to be installed on these vehicles have drawn a lot of recent research interest. In this paper, we address the important path-planning problem for autonomous vehicles. We introduce and formulate the novel paintbrush coverage problem. We present a theoretical study on the minimum trajectory length of a paintbrush to cover an arbitrary convex region, which is derived as a function of the area of the region and the size of the cover. Three commonly-used patrolling/scouting methods, namely boustrophedon, spiral, and sector, are manifested in details as the potential solutions to the paintbrush coverage problem. The theoretical minimum trajectory lengths any algorithm can achieve are also demonstrated as the benchmarks for different shapes of regions.
Publication Source (Journal or Book title)
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
First Page
3239
Last Page
3250
Recommended Citation
Huang, S., Sun, E., Wu, H., & Busch, C. (2021). The Paintbrush Coverage Problem. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 20 (11), 3239-3250. https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2020.2998406