A performance comparison of coverage algorithms for simple robotic vacuum cleaners

Abstract: Cheap automatic robotic vacuum cleaners keep their cost down by having less sensors and many of them focus on using a single frontal bumper sensor, this makes it important to be able to get good coverage of a room with no knowledge of said room. This paper investigates whether the algorithm boustrophedon is enough to get a good coverage of a simple room with a maximum of two furnitures and only 90 degree corners. A graphical simulation were made to test the algorithms that are commonly used in cheap automatic robotic vacuum cleaners to compare them with the result of only using boustrophedon. The results show that the best algorithms are the non-deterministic random walk and all combined. Boustrophedon tends to get stuck when the room is not empty and it only cleans half the room when starting in the middle of the room, while being the fastest and gets most coverage in an empty room when starting in a corner.