2017/03/17 by Bose, Prosenjit, Kostitsyna, Irina, Langerman, Stefan · 1 citation
#Computational Geometry (cs.CG) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1703.06107
We study self-approaching paths that are contained in a simple polygon. A self-approaching path is a directed curve connecting two points such that the Euclidean distance between a point moving along the path and any future position does not increase, that is, for all points a, b, and c that appear in that order along the curve, |ac| ≥ |bc|. We analyze the properties, and present a characterization of shortest self-approaching paths. In particular, we show that a shortest self-approaching path connecting two points inside a polygon can be forced to use a general class of non-algebraic curves. While this makes it difficult to design an exact algorithm, we show how to find a self-approaching path inside a polygon connecting two points under a model of computation which assumes that we can calculate involute curves of high order. Lastly, we provide an algorithm to test if a given simple polygon is self-approaching, that is, if there exists a self-approaching path for any two points inside the polygon.