The Voronoi Diagram of Rotating Rays With applications to Floodlight Illumination

Abstract

We introduce the Voronoi Diagram of Rotating Rays, a Voronoi structure where the input sites are rays, and the distance function is the counterclockwise angular distance between a point and a ray-site. This novel Voronoi diagram is motivated by illumination and coverage problems, where a domain has to be covered by floodlights (wedges) of uniform angle, and the goal is to find the minimum angle necessary to cover the domain. We study the diagram in the plane, and we present structural properties, combinatorial complexity bounds, and a construction algorithm. If the rays are induced by a convex polygon, we show how to construct the ray Voronoi diagram within this polygon in linear time. Using this information, we can find in optimal linear time the Brocard angle, the minimum angle required to illuminate a convex polygon with floodlights of uniform angle. This last algorithm improves upon previous results, settling an interesting open problem