There is a planar graph almost as good as the complete graph

  • Authors:
  • P Chew

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

  • Venue:
  • SCG '86 Proceedings of the second annual symposium on Computational geometry
  • Year:
  • 1986

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Abstract

Given a set S of points in the plane, there is a triangulation of S such that a path found within this triangulation has length bounded by a constant times the straight-line distance between the endpoints of the path. Specifically, for any two points a and b of S there is a path along edges of the triangulation with length less than √10 times |ab|, where |ab| is the straight-line Euclidean distance between a and b. Thus, a shortest path in this planar graph is less than about 3 times longer than the corresponding straight-line distance. The triangulation that has this property is the L1 metric Delaunay triangulation for the set 5. This result can be applied to motion planning in the plane. Given a source, a destination, and a set of polygonal obstacles of size n, an &Ogr;(n) size data structure can be used to find a reasonable approximation to the shortest path between the source and the destination in &Ogr;(n log n) time.