Online exploration outside a convex obstacle

Abstract

A watchman path is a path such that a direct line of sight exists between each point in some region and some point along the path. Here, we study the online watchman path problem outside a convex polygon, i.e., in ${\mathbb{R}}^2\setminus \Omega$, where $\Omega$ is a convex polygon that is not known in advance. We present an algorithm for the exploration of the region outside the polygon. We prove that the presented algorithms guarantees a $\approx 22.77$ competitive ratio compared to the optimal offline watchman path.