Online Exploration of Polygons with Holes

TL;DR

This paper presents an online exploration strategy for autonomous robots to efficiently explore unknown polygons with holes, achieving competitive ratios based on the number of holes and a novel hybrid approach.

Contribution

It introduces a new (h+c_0)!-competitive exploration strategy for polygons with holes, assuming holes are marked, and provides a new lower bound for small h.

Findings

Strategy is (h+c_0)!-competitive under certain marking assumptions

Introduces a hybrid approach for exploration

Provides a lower bound for small h

Abstract

We study online strategies for autonomous mobile robots with vision to explore unknown polygons with at most h holes. Our main contribution is an (h+c_0)!-competitive strategy for such polygons under the assumption that each hole is marked with a special color, where c_0 is a universal constant. The strategy is based on a new hybrid approach. Furthermore, we give a new lower bound construction for small h.