4,839 research outputs found
Searching Polyhedra by Rotating Half-Planes
The Searchlight Scheduling Problem was first studied in 2D polygons, where
the goal is for point guards in fixed positions to rotate searchlights to catch
an evasive intruder. Here the problem is extended to 3D polyhedra, with the
guards now boundary segments who rotate half-planes of illumination. After
carefully detailing the 3D model, several results are established. The first is
a nearly direct extension of the planar one-way sweep strategy using what we
call exhaustive guards, a generalization that succeeds despite there being no
well-defined notion in 3D of planar "clockwise rotation". Next follow two
results: every polyhedron with r>0 reflex edges can be searched by at most r^2
suitably placed guards, whereas just r guards suffice if the polyhedron is
orthogonal. (Minimizing the number of guards to search a given polyhedron is
easily seen to be NP-hard.) Finally we show that deciding whether a given set
of guards has a successful search schedule is strongly NP-hard, and that
deciding if a given target area is searchable at all is strongly PSPACE-hard,
even for orthogonal polyhedra. A number of peripheral results are proved en
route to these central theorems, and several open problems remain for future
work.Comment: 45 pages, 26 figure
Multi-Agent Deployment for Visibility Coverage in Polygonal Environments with Holes
This article presents a distributed algorithm for a group of robotic agents
with omnidirectional vision to deploy into nonconvex polygonal environments
with holes. Agents begin deployment from a common point, possess no prior
knowledge of the environment, and operate only under line-of-sight sensing and
communication. The objective of the deployment is for the agents to achieve
full visibility coverage of the environment while maintaining line-of-sight
connectivity with each other. This is achieved by incrementally partitioning
the environment into distinct regions, each completely visible from some agent.
Proofs are given of (i) convergence, (ii) upper bounds on the time and number
of agents required, and (iii) bounds on the memory and communication
complexity. Simulation results and description of robust extensions are also
included
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