2,214 research outputs found
Polygon Exploration with Time-Discrete Vision
With the advent of autonomous robots with two- and three-dimensional scanning
capabilities, classical visibility-based exploration methods from computational
geometry have gained in practical importance. However, real-life laser scanning
of useful accuracy does not allow the robot to scan continuously while in
motion; instead, it has to stop each time it surveys its environment. This
requirement was studied by Fekete, Klein and Nuechter for the subproblem of
looking around a corner, but until now has not been considered in an online
setting for whole polygonal regions.
We give the first algorithmic results for this important algorithmic problem
that combines stationary art gallery-type aspects with watchman-type issues in
an online scenario: We demonstrate that even for orthoconvex polygons, a
competitive strategy can be achieved only for limited aspect ratio A (the ratio
of the maximum and minimum edge length of the polygon), i.e., for a given lower
bound on the size of an edge; we give a matching upper bound by providing an
O(log A)-competitive strategy for simple rectilinear polygons, using the
assumption that each edge of the polygon has to be fully visible from some scan
point.Comment: 28 pages, 17 figures, 2 photographs, 3 tables, Latex. Updated some
details (title, figures and text) for final journal revision, including
explicit assumption of full edge visibilit
Complexity of the General Chromatic Art Gallery Problem
In the original Art Gallery Problem (AGP), one seeks the minimum number of
guards required to cover a polygon . We consider the Chromatic AGP (CAGP),
where the guards are colored. As long as is completely covered, the number
of guards does not matter, but guards with overlapping visibility regions must
have different colors. This problem has applications in landmark-based mobile
robot navigation: Guards are landmarks, which have to be distinguishable (hence
the colors), and are used to encode motion primitives, \eg, "move towards the
red landmark". Let , the chromatic number of , denote the minimum
number of colors required to color any guard cover of . We show that
determining, whether is \NP-hard for all . Keeping
the number of colors minimal is of great interest for robot navigation, because
less types of landmarks lead to cheaper and more reliable recognition
Peierls substitution in the energy dispersion of a hexagonal lattice
The method of the Peierls substitution in studying the magnetic subband
structure of a hexagonal lattice is re-examined. Several errors in the
formalism of a couple of recent papers are pointed out and rectified so as to
describe the effect of the magnetic field pertinently.Comment: 3 pages (two-columns), 2 EPS figures, submitted to J. Phys.: Condens.
Matte
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