# Herding an Adversarial Attacker to a Safe Area for Defending Safety-Critical Infrastructure

## TL;DR

This paper presents a novel vector-field guidance method to herd adversarial aerial attackers away from safety-critical infrastructure in urban environments, effectively guiding defenders to a safe zone while avoiding obstacles.

## Contribution

It introduces a new vector field with super-elliptic contours for obstacle avoidance and a finite-time stabilizing controller for defender formation in urban defense scenarios.

## Key findings

- Effective herd guidance demonstrated via simulations
- New vector field design closely matches rectangular obstacles
- Finite-time controller ensures rapid formation achievement

## Abstract

This paper investigates a problem of defending safety-critical infrastructure from an adversarial aerial attacker in an urban environment. A circular arc formation of defenders is formed around the attacker, and vector-field based guidance laws herd the attacker to a predefined safe area in the presence of rectangular obstacles. The defenders' formation is defined based on a novel vector field that imposes super-elliptic contours around the obstacles, to closely resemble their rectangular shape. A novel finite-time stabilizing controller is proposed to guide the defenders to their desired formation while avoiding obstacles and inter-agent collisions. The efficiency of the approach is demonstrated via simulation results.