How to collect balls moving in the Euclidean plane Original Research Article

In this paper, we study how to collect n balls moving with a fixed constant velocity in the Euclidean plane by k robots moving on straight track-lines through the origin. Since all the balls might not be caught by robots, differently from Moving-target TSP, we consider the following 3 problems in various situations: (i) deciding if k robots can collect all n balls; (ii) maximizing the number of the balls collected by k robots; (iii) minimizing the number of the robots to collect all n balls. The situations considered in this paper contain the cases in which track-lines are given (or not), and track-lines are identical (or not). For all problems and situations, we provide polynomial time algorithms or proofs of intractability, which clarify the tractability–intractability frontier in the ball collecting problems in the Euclidean plane.