Surveillance and Collision-Free Tracking of an Aggressive Evader With an Actuated Sensor Pursuer

This letter addresses a visibility-based pursuit-evasion game. The pursuer’s task is to maintain the evader’s visibility continuously. The evader’s objective is to avoid the pursuer’s surveillance. Some contributions of this work are the following: 1) We present a pursuer’s motion strategy that can avoid collisions with the evader. Thus, we have generalized the problem considering that hitting the pursuer produces an escape for the evader. 2) A general mathematical formulation is proposed based on a min-max approach to model the game. Utilizing that formulation, several alternatives for player strategies are presented that vary on which player takes the initiative to move first. Among these strategies, if the evader can escape, it searches for a trajectory that generates the escape in the shortest possible time. We present simulations considering challenging game scenarios. We also offer comparisons with surveillance strategies proposed in the literature, showing that our approach can deal with a broader range of situations. Additionally, previous approaches cannot deal with an aggressive evader, and most of them only provide a strategy for the pursuer. In contrast, this work provides strategies for both players. Furthermore, previous approaches do not consider who acts as a leader, namely, which player moves first.