Campos, Francisco M.Carreira, FernandoCalado, João Manuel Ferreira2018-05-092018-05-092018-04CAMPOS, Francisco M.; CARREIRA, Fernando; CALADO, J. M. F. – Finding a short path for mobile robot arm coverage of a point set. In 18th IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC). Torres Vedras, Portugal: IEEE, 2018. ISBN 978-1-5386-5346-6. Pp. 192-198978-1-5386-5346-6http://hdl.handle.net/10400.21/8493Este trabalho foi financiado pelo Concurso Anual para Projetos de Investigação, Desenvolvimento, Inovação e Criação Artística (IDI&CA) 2016 do Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa. Código de referência IPL/2016/PROMPT/ISELThis paper introduces the problema of Mobile Robot Arm Covering (MRAC) along with a three-step procedure to solve it. In Mobile Robot Arm Covering one seeks the shortest path of a mobile robot equipped with a manipulator such that the manipulator workspace covers a given set of geometric entities. In this paper we consider the problema of covering a set of points. This is solved by a three-step procedure: the search space is first discretized into a finite set of robot poses; then the resulting combinatorial problem is solved by a memetic algorithm and, finally, the given solution is improved in the continuous space. Two popular discretization schemes developed for the related Close Enough Traveling Salesman Problem (CETSP) are evaluated in the MRAC context. Futhermore, a new memetic algorithm to solve MRAC and CETSP instances is developed. This algorithm overcomes the limitations of the approaches based on General Traveling Salesman Problem (GTSP) solvers, namely, the difficulty in handling large problems and the large computational times required to solve them.engMobile robot arm systemsRobot coveringClose enough travelling salesman problemMemetic algorithmconference object