Finding the Minimum-Distance Schedule for a Boundary Searcher with a Flashlight

Consider a dark polygonal region in which intruders move freely, trying to avoid detection. A robot, which is equipped with a flashlight, moves along the polygon boundary to illuminate all intruders. We want to minimize the total distance traveled by the robot until all intruders are detected in the worst case. We present an O(n log n) time and O(n) space algorithm for optimizing this metric, where n is the number of vertices of the given polygon. This improves upon the best known time and space complexities of O(n2 ) and O(n2 ), respectively.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: LATIN
• Authors: Tsunehiko Kameda, Ichiro Suzuki, John Z. Zhang
• Keywords: Dark Polygonal Region, Information Retrieval, Intruders, LATIN 2010, Polygon Boundary