Watchman routes for robot inspection

Abstract

Inspection is a hot topic of robotics recently, and there are many different ways to solve the inspection problem. In this paper, we propose a new framework for a robust and efficient inspection of the entire workspace in a watchman route based on automatically generated waypoints. The framework architecture design includes several relevant technologies and refines algorithms such as medial axis transformation, shortest path approximation, and Monte-Carlo search for finding tours. This framework is evaluated in a client-server system: the simulation of the robot is run on Unity, while data processing is executed in a Python server. Experimenting with this approach, the measured inspection coverage of the workspace on random terrains was at least 99.6%.