Clearing an Orthogonal Polygon Using Sliding Robots

Abstract

In a multi-robot system, a number of autonomous robots would sense, communicate, and decide to move within a given domain to achieve a common goal. In this paper, we consider a new variant of the pursuit-evasion problem in which the robots (pursuers) each move back and forth along an orthogonal line segment inside a simple orthogonal polygon $P$. A point $p$ can be covered by a sliding robot that moves along a line segment s, if there exists a point $q\in s$ such that $\overline{pq}$ is a line segment perpendicular to $s$. In the pursuit-evasion problem, a polygonal region is given and a robot called a pursuer tries to find some mobile targets called evaders. The goal of this problem is to design a motion strategy for the pursuer such that it can detect all the evaders. We assume that $P$ includes unpredictable, moving evaders that have unbounded speed. We propose a motion-planning algorithm for a group of sliding robots, assuming that they move along the pre-located line segments with a constant speed to detect all the evaders with unbounded speed.