  The pandemic by COVID-19 is causing a devastating effect on the health of
global population. There are several efforts to prevent the spread of the
virus. Among those efforts, cleaning and disinfecting public areas have become
important tasks. In order to contribute in this direction, this paper proposes
a coverage path planning algorithm for a spraying drone, a micro aerial vehicle
that has mounted a sprayer/sprinkler system, to disinfect areas. In contrast
with planners in the state-of-the-art, this proposal presents i) a new
sprayer/sprinkler model that fits a more realistic coverage volume to the drop
dispersion and ii) a planning algorithm that efficiently restricts the flight
to the region of interest avoiding potential collisions in bounded scenes. The
drone with the algorithm has been tested in several simulation scenes, showing
that the algorithm is effective and covers more areas with respect to other
approaches in the literature. Note that the proposal is not limited to
disinfection applications, but can be applied to other ones, such as painting
or precision agriculture.
