On the Problem of Covering a 3-D Terrain

Abstract We study the problem of covering a 3-dimensional terrain by a sweeping robot that is equipped with a camera. We model the terrain as a mesh in a way that captures the elevation levels of the terrain; this enables a graph-theoretic formulation of the problem in which the underlying graph is a weighted plane graph. We show that the associated graph problem is NP-hard, and that it admits a polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS). Finally, we implement two heuristic algorithms based on greedy approaches and report our findings.