On Covering of Cylindrical and Conical Surfaces with Equal Balls

The article concerns the problem of covering the lateral surface of a right circular cylinder or a cone with equal balls. The surface is required to belong to their union, and the balls’ radius is minimal. The centers of the balls must lie on the covered surface. The problem is relevant for mathematics and for applications since it arises in security and communications. We develop heuristic algorithms for covering construction based on a geodesic Voronoi diagram. The construction of a covering is a non-trivial task since the line of intersection of a cylinder or a cone with a sphere is a closed curve of the fourth order. To compare the numerical results with the known ones, we unroll the surface of revolution onto a plane. Another feature is that, we use both Euclidean distance and a special non-Euclidean metric, which can describe the speed of signal propagation in a heterogeneous medium. We also perform a numerical experiment and discuss its results. Meanwhile, it is shown that with a small number of circles covering a planification of the cylindrical surface, their radius is significantly less than for a similar rectangle.