Model Predictive Control based Target Defense with Attacker Trajectory Prediction

This paper considers a target attack defense scenario where the attacker aims to reach the target while avoiding the defender, and the defender wants to protect the target by intercepting the attacker. While most of the prior works assume the target to be known to the defender, in our setting the defender has access to only the current states of the attacker at any instant, and is not aware of the target coordinates. A novel approach is proposed in this work to leverage past data of the attacker states to construct a future trajectory of the attacker. The defender deploys a model predictive control scheme to minimize the discrepancy between its own future trajectory and the predicted future trajectory of the attacker. Simulation results show that use of estimated future trajectories helps in more effective protection of the target compared to when only current state of the attacker is used. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is also highlighted in the presence of obstacles.