Arm Coverage Path Planning

Implementation of our ICRA'25 paper: Hierarchically Accelerated Coverage Path Planning for Redundant Manipulators

[Paper link to appear]

Introduction

This is a coverage path planner for robotic arms. It efficiently computes arm motions for tasks such as wiping, sanding, and polishing, where the end effector must cover a surface.

This code builds upon RangedIK and GLKH. We modified the original GLKH to handle sparse graphs.

This code was tested on Ubuntu 24.04. If you encounter a bug or would like to request a new feature, please open an issue.

Getting Started

1. Install Rust

2. Compile Rust:

   cd arm_coverage
   cargo build

3. Comiple GLKH

   cd GLKH
   make
   cd ..

   Test GLKH following GLKH's readme

4. Run:

   python3 scripts/run_experiments.py
   

   This code processes the surfaces under /surfaces/ and save motions under /motions/. By default, run_experiments.py runs three coverage path planners.

   Coverage Path Planner	Description
   hrchy_gtsp	our proposed approach; efficient and effective
   joint_gtsp	baseline approach 1; slow and may not converge
   cartesian_tsp	baseline approach 2; fast but not optimal

Visualize generated motions

• Open a scene

  Click and drag "Scene 1" in the upper left cornor to open it

• Add an iiwa robot

  In the panel on the right, under the "File" tab, locate the mesh section. Choose "iiwa" from the drop-down menu, then click the "confirm" button. An iiwa robot will be added to Scene 1.

• Upload the motion file

  In the panel on the right, under the "File" tab, locate the motion section. Click "Browse file", then choose your local file: panda_hrchy_gtsp_XXXXX.csv. Upload the selected file.

• Play the motion

  Click the play button located in the lower left corner to play the motion.

Use your own robot

1. Place your robot's URDF under configs/urdfs/
2. Make a setting file. Examples are under configs/example_settings

Citation

@article{wang2025hierarchically,
  title={Hierarchically Accelerated Coverage Path Planning for Redundant Manipulators},
  author={Wang, Yeping and Gleicher, Michael},
  booktitle={2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year={2025}
}