Rectilinear Path Problems among Rectilinear Obstacles Revisited

Efficient algorithms are presented for finding rectilinear collision-free paths between two given points among a set of rectilinear obstacles. The results improve the time complexity of previous results for finding the shortest rectilinear path, the minimum-bend shortest rectilinear path, the shortest minimum-bend rectilinear path and the minimum-cost rectilinear path. For finding the shortest rectilinear path, a graph-theoretic approach is used and an algorithm is obtained with $O(m\log t+ t\log^{3/2} t)$ running time, where $t$ is the number of extreme edges of given obstacles and $m$ is the number of obstacle edges. Based on this result an $O(N\log N+(m+N)\log t + (t+N)\log^2 (t+N))$ running time algorithm for computing the $L_1$ minimum spanning tree of given $N$ terminals among rectilinear obstacles is obtained. For finding the minimum-bend shortest path, the shortest minimum-bend rectilinear path, and the minimum-cost rectilinear path, we devise a new dynamic-searching approach and derive algorithms that run in $O(m\log^2m)$ time using $O(m\log m)$ space or run in $O(m\log^{3/2}m)$ time and space.