Authors: Nare Karapetyan, Ioannis Rekleitis
Abstract: Autonomous area coverage is an important problem arising in environmental monitoring, search and rescue,infrastructure monitoring, and survey operations. Particularly when an area of interest has unstructured boundaries, such as rivers, the state-of the art approaches of area coverage path planning are not directly applicable. In addition, during coverage operations, and path planning in general, in dynamic environments inaccurate navigation from waypoint to waypoint presents extra challenges. In this work we present an overview of different patterns that can be utilized for river coverage in surveying, water sampling, and bathymetric mapping operations. In addition we discuss how a reactive method can be used for more accurate navigation when the environmental forces affect the navigation of the surface vehicle. Described methods have been tested utilizing an autonomous surface vehicle on different segments of the Congaree River in South Carolina, USA. All experiments resulted in total of more than 55km of coverage trajectories in the field.