Recursive non-uniform coverage of unknown terrains for UAVs

Area coverage is one of the compelling applications of UAVs. The existing methods for coverage path planning assume a uniformly interesting target area. However in many real world applications items of interest are not uniformly distributed but form clusters. Here it can be advantageous to only sample regions of interest while skipping uninteresting sections of the environment. In this paper, we present a coverage tree structure that can accommodate non-uniform coverage of regions in the target area. Three strategies are proposed to traverse the coverage tree. Experiments indicate that in some situations our method can cover the interesting regions with about half the travel time / cost of a naive regular `lawnmower' coverage pattern.