The Voronoi Diagram of Rotating Rays with applications to Floodlight Illumination

04/22/2023

∙

by   Carlos Alegría, et al.

∙

0

∙

share

We study the Voronoi Diagram of Rotating Rays, a Voronoi structure where the input sites are rays and the distance function between a point and a site/ray, is the counterclockwise angular distance. This novel Voronoi diagram is motivated by illumination or coverage problems, where a domain must be covered by floodlights/wedges of uniform angle, and the goal is to find the minimum angle necessary to cover the domain. We study the diagram in the plane, and we present structural properties, combinatorial complexity bounds, and a construction algorithm. If the rays are induced by a convex polygon, we show how to construct the Voronoi diagram within this polygon in linear time. Using this information, we can find in optimal linear time the Brocard angle, the minimum angle required to illuminate a convex polygon with floodlights of uniform angle.