Motion Planning for a Convex Polygon in a Polygonal Environment

We study the motion-planning problem for a convex m -gon P in a planar polygonal environment Q bounded by n edges. We give the first algorithm that constructs the entire free configuration space (the three-dimensional space of all free placements of P in Q ) in time that is near-quadratic in mn , which is nearly optimal in the worst case. The algorithm is also conceptually simple. Previous solutions were incomplete, more expensive, or produced only part of the free configuration space. Combining our solution with parametric searching, we obtain an algorithm that finds the largest placement of P in Q in time that is also near-quadratic in mn . In addition, we describe an algorithm that preprocesses the computed free configuration space so that reachability queries can be answered in polylogarithmic time. Received September 9, 1997, and in revised form September 24, 1998.