[rland]

I'm a little bit familiar with the robot vacuum cleaner mentioned.

This area (in robotics) is called "complete coverage path planning" and has quite a bit of research in it. Getting an efficient path is challenging when you can only see a limited area.

There are neural net approaches that split an area into cells and assign weights to adjacent cells to direct the motion. Generally, the name of the game is to make an optimization among path length, energy, time, etc.