Evasion from a group of pursuers with a prescribed target set for the evader

摘要

We consider the problem of characterizing an evasion strategy for an agent under pursuit by multiple independent agents that are distributed in a convex polygon. The proposed evasion strategy is centrally dependent on a generalized Voronoi partition of the polygon, whose proximity metric is the time of capture of the evader by the nearest pursuer. Specifically, the boundaries of the Voronoi cells determine a set of preferable paths for the evader that will safely take it to a prescribed target set. The motion of the pursuers is accounted for by sequential re-partitioning and re-planning. A novel method for the computation of the generalized Voronoi partition, which exploits the structure of the solution to a two-player differential game, is presented. It is shown that the proposed method is significantly faster (by at least one order of magnitude) than two known methods in the literature; this expedites computation of the proposed evasion strategy. Numerical simulations that illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed evasion strategy are presented.