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Combinatorial complexity of translating a box in polyhedral 3-space

  • Dan Halperin*
  • , Chee Keng Yap
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • New York University

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

We study the space of free translations of a box amidst polyhedral obstacles with n vertices. We show that the combinatorial complexity of this space is O(n2α(n)), where α(n) is the inverse Ackermann function. Our bound is within an α(n) factor off the lower bound, and it constitutes an improvement of almost an order of magnitude over the best previously known (and naive) bound for this problem, O(n3). For the case of a convex polygon of fixed (constant) size translating in the same setting (namely, a two-dimensional polygon translating in three-dimensional space), we show a tight bound Θ(n2α(n)) on the complexity of the free space.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)181-196
Number of pages16
JournalComputational Geometry: Theory and Applications
Volume9
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 1998

Funding

FundersFunder number
National Science Foundation9002819

    Keywords

    • Computational geometry
    • Minkowski sums
    • Motion planning

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