CAP: A Connectivity-Aware Hierarchical Coverage Path Planning Algorithm for Unknown Environments using Coverage Guidance Graph

-- Efficient coverage of unknown environments requires robots to adapt their paths in real time based on on-board sensor data. In this paper, we introduce CAP, a connectivity-aware hierarchical coverage path planning algorithm for efficient coverage of unknown environments. During online operation, CAP incrementally constructs a coverage guidance graph to capture essential information about the environment. Based on the updated graph, the hierarchical planner determines an efficient path to maximize global coverage efficiency and minimize local coverage time. The performance of CAP is evaluated and compared with five baseline algorithms through high-fidelity simulations as well as robot experiments. Our results show that CAP yields significant improvements in coverage time, path length, and path overlap ratio. Optimized coverage path planning (CPP) enables robots to achieve complete coverage of all points in a search area efficiently.