Online Coverage by a Tethered Autonomous Mobile Robot in Planar Unknown Environments.

This paper is concerned with an online tethered coverage (TC), in which a mobile robot of size D is attached to a fixed point S by a cable of finite length L. Starting at S, the robot has to cover an unknown planar environment that contains obstacles and return to S with the cable fully retracted. The paper first establishes an optimal offline TC methodology, then introduces the TC algorithm that ...