An efficient strategy for rapidly finding an object in a polygonal world

In this paper, we propose an approach to solve the problem of finding an object in a polygon which may contain holes. We define an optimal solution as the route that minimizes the expected time it takes to find said object. The object search problem is shown to be NP-hard by reduction, therefore, we propose the heuristic of an utility function, defined as the ratio of a gain over a cost and a greedy algorithm in a reduced search space that is able to explore several steps ahead without incurring in too high computational cost. This approach was implemented and simulation results are shown.

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