Minimum-Link Shortest Paths for Polygons amidst Rectilinear Obstacles

Abstract

Consider two axis-aligned rectilinear simple polygons in the domain consisting of axis-aligned rectilinear obstacles in the plane such that the bounding boxes, one for each obstacle and one for each polygon, are disjoint. We present an algorithm that computes a minimum-link rectilinear shortest path connecting the two polygons in $O((N+n)\log (N+n))$ time using $O(N+n)$ space, where $n$ is the number of vertices in the domain and $N$ is the total number of vertices of the two polygons.