Defending a Perimeter from a Ground Intruder Using an Aerial Defender: Theory and Practice

TL;DR

This paper explores the application of perimeter defense strategies from pursuit-evasion theory to real-world robotic systems, specifically an aerial defender and ground intruder on a hemispherical perimeter, analyzing performance differences.

Contribution

It extends theoretical perimeter defense models to practical robotic scenarios with realistic actuation and sensing, highlighting performance gaps and proposing evaluation metrics.

Findings

Performance discrepancy observed when applying theory to robots.

Simulation results in Gazebo demonstrate practical challenges.

Proposed metrics enable comparative analysis of defense strategies.

Abstract

The perimeter defense game has received interest in recent years as a variant of the pursuit-evasion game. A number of previous works have solved this game to obtain the optimal strategies for defender and intruder, but the derived theory considers the players as point particles with first-order assumptions. In this work, we aim to apply the theory derived from the perimeter defense problem to robots with realistic models of actuation and sensing and observe performance discrepancy in relaxing the first-order assumptions. In particular, we focus on the hemisphere perimeter defense problem where a ground intruder tries to reach the base of a hemisphere while an aerial defender constrained to move on the hemisphere aims to capture the intruder. The transition from theory to practice is detailed, and the designed system is simulated in Gazebo. Two metrics for parametric analysis and comparative study are proposed to evaluate the performance discrepancy.