Encirclement Guaranteed Cooperative Pursuit with Robust Model Predictive Control

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust model predictive control framework for cooperative pursuit involving multiple pursuers encircling and capturing an evader, ensuring encirclement and improving success rates in pursuit scenarios.

Contribution

It develops a novel RMPC-based approach with a partitioning scheme to handle encirclement constraints, enabling decentralized solutions for pursuit problems.

Findings

The proposed method effectively guarantees encirclement and capture.

Simulation results show improved pursuit success compared to existing methods.

Decentralized TMPC solutions are computationally feasible and robust.

Abstract

This paper studies a novel encirclement guaranteed cooperative pursuit problem involving $N$ pursuers and a single evader in an unbounded two-dimensional game domain. Throughout the game, the pursuers are required to maintain encirclement of the evader, i.e., the evader should always stay inside the convex hull generated by all the pursuers, in addition to achieving the classical capture condition. To tackle this challenging cooperative pursuit problem, a robust model predictive control (RMPC) based formulation framework is first introduced, which simultaneously accounts for the encirclement and capture requirements under the assumption that the evader's action is unavailable to all pursuers. Despite the reformulation, the resulting RMPC problem involves a bilinear constraint due to the encirclement requirement. To further handle such a bilinear constraint, a novel encirclement guaranteed partitioning scheme is devised that simplifies the original bilinear RMPC problem to a number of linear tube MPC (TMPC) problems solvable in a decentralized manner. Simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution framework. Furthermore, comparisons with existing approaches show that the explicit consideration of the encirclement condition significantly improves the chance of successful capture of the evader in various scenarios.