Walking an unknown street with bounded detour

A polygon with two distinguished vertices, s and g, is called a street if the two boundary chains from s to g are mutually weakly visible. For a mobile robot with on-board vision system we describe a strategy for finding a short path from s to g in a street not known in advance, and prove that the length of the path created does not exceed 1 + π times the length of the shortest path from s to g. Experiments suggest that our strategy is much better than this, as no ratio bigger than 1.8 has yet been observed. This is complemented by a lower bound of 1.41 for the relative detour each strategy can be forced to generate.