Optimal Covering Tours with Turn Costs

Esther M. Arkin, Michael A. Bender, Erik D. Demaine, Sándor P. Fekete, Joseph S. B. Mitchell, Saurabh Sethia
2005 SIAM journal on computing (Print)  
We give the first algorithmic study of a class of "covering tour" problems related to the geometric traveling salesman problem: Find a polygonal tour for a cutter so that it sweeps out a specified region ("pocket") in order to minimize a cost that depends mainly on the number of turns. These problems arise naturally in manufacturing applications of computational geometry to automatic tool path generation and automatic inspection systems, as well as arc routing ("postman") problems with turn
more » ... lties. We prove the NP-completeness of minimum-turn milling and give efficient approximation algorithms for several natural versions of the problem, including a polynomialtime approximation scheme based on a novel adaptation of the m-guillotine method.
doi:10.1137/s0097539703434267 fatcat:2ozdkdafgzcxbanveap6izyafu