Many robotic applications, such as sanding, polishing, wiping and sensor scanning, require a manipulator to dexterously cover a surface using its end-effector. In this paper, we provide an efficient and effective coverage path planning approach that leverages a manipulator's redundancy and task tolerances to minimize costs in joint space. We formulate the problem as a Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem and hierarchically streamline the graph size. Our strategy is to identify guide paths that roughly cover the surface and accelerate the computation by solving a sequence of smaller problems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through a simulation experiment and an illustrative demonstration using a physical robot.

@InProceedings{WG25a,
  author       = "Wang, Yeping and Gleicher, Michael",
  title        = "Hierarchically Accelerated Coverage Path Planning for Redundant Manipulators ",
  booktitle    = "IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)",
  year         = "2025",
  publisher    = "IEEE",
  url          = "http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Papers/2025/WG25a"
}