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A vacuum robot runs on randomized direction when it is operating in a room.

I want to know how long it takes to fully cover the whole area (or at least most part of the area) with given information:

  1. the area in the room is 10 square meters.
  2. the dimension of the round shape robot is 40 centimeter.
  3. the robot travels at a speed of 20 meters per minute.
  4. the robot only travels straightly.
  5. the robot forwards to a random direction when hit the wall.

Below the left is a vacuum robot. The right is the imagination of a working robot.

I'm not sure if it relates to routing problem or other Operations Research method. (neither sure if it is a problem that can be optimized by Operation Research but just allow me to put it here.)

Can you please advise how to solve this problem? Thank you

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    $\begingroup$ "or at least most part of the area" needs to be defined properly. There might be an area on the plain (in the extreme case a point) that is never touched with a positive probability which implies that the expected time of covering the entire area is infinity. $\endgroup$
    – rasul
    Jan 3, 2021 at 0:35
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    $\begingroup$ I think this is a very interesting mathematics question. I suggest that you post this question to either math.stackexchange or mathoverflow and use the keywords expectation, expected-value and geometric-probability. This question or its variants may have already been solved. Otherwise, you will know if the question is relatively new or still open. $\endgroup$
    – rasul
    Jan 3, 2021 at 1:34
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    $\begingroup$ @Mark K, would you see this or this links. They would be helpful. $\endgroup$
    – A.Omidi
    Jan 3, 2021 at 7:22
  • $\begingroup$ @r.beigi, A.Omidi, thank you both for the comments! $\endgroup$
    – Mark K
    Jan 4, 2021 at 0:56

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I don't know if a closed form solution is achievable. Assuming you can quantify how the robot selects its next direction when it hits a boundary (uniform over the entire circle, uniform over directions not within some angle of its last direction, some nonuniform distribution, ...), you could fairly easily build a simulation model (starting with an empty room -- furniture could be included but would make the model much more complex). Run the simulation a zillion times and you have an estimated distribution for the time to achieve a specified level of coverage. There are other complicating factors you could build in if you chose (such as battery life -- the vac might run out of juice before it achieved the target coverage level).

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