A Markov Decision Model for Area Coverage in Autonomous Demining Robot

Abstract

A review of literature shows that there is a variety of works studying coverage path planning in several autonomous robotic applications. In this work, we propose a new approach using Markov Decision Process to plan an optimum path to reach the general goal of exploring an unknown environment containing buried mines. This approach, called Goals to Goals Area Coverage on-line Algorithm, is based on a decomposition of the state space into smaller regions whose states are considered as goals with the same reward value, the reward value is decremented from one region to another according to the desired search mode. The numerical simulations show that our approach is promising for minimizing the necessary cost-energy to cover the entire area.