| Article ID: | iaor20041160 |
| Country: | United States |
| Volume: | 17 |
| Issue: | 1/2 |
| Start Page Number: | 25 |
| End Page Number: | 50 |
| Publication Date: | Jan 2000 |
| Journal: | Computational Geometry |
| Authors: | Arkin Esther M., Mitchell Joseph S.B., Fekete Sandor P. |
We study the problem of finding shortest tours/paths for ‘lawn mowing’ and ‘milling’ problems: Given a region in the plane, and given the shape of a ‘cutter’ (typically, a circle or a square), find a shortest tour/path for the cutter such that every point within the region is covered by the cutter at some position along the tour/path. In the milling version of the problem, the cutter is constrained to stay within the region. The milling problem arises naturally in the area of automatic tools.