Authors: Ibrahim Salman, Jason M. O'Kane, Ioannis Rekleitis
Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of covering large bodies of water to collect quantitative measurements of water quality with an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) to aid in monitoring and predicting harmful cyanobacteria blooms. The algorithm produces ASV trajectories that visit all representative areas of the environment, including circumnavigating islands, when present, by utilizing the skeleton of the skeleton method. This method finds the medial axis of the body of water, prunes redundant branches, then finds the midpoints (skeleton) between the trimmed medial axis and the boundaries of the area of interest. This work addresses the issue of separate components of produced trajectory in the presence of islands, by identifying individual trajectories as independent contours, then generating the shortest paths between these contours resulting in a continuous cyclic path covering the entire selected body of water in a single pass.