A Family of Switching Pursuit Strategies for a Multi-Pursuer Single-Evader Game

TL;DR

This paper proposes a family of pursuit strategies for multi-pursuer single-evader games that switch to effective two-pursuer strategies under certain conditions, improving success rates and performance in pursuit scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel switching pursuit strategy framework that leverages two-pursuer game solutions to enhance multi-pursuer pursuit effectiveness.

Findings

Switching strategies improve pursuit success rates.

Numerical simulations show enhanced performance over existing algorithms.

The approach generalizes pursuit strategies in planar environments.

Abstract

This paper introduces a new family of pursuit strategies for multi-pursuer single-evader games in a planar environment. They leverage conditions under which the minimum-time solution of the game becomes equivalent to that of a suitable two-pursuer single-evader game. This enables the design of strategies in which the pursuers first aim to meet such conditions, and then transition to a two-pursuer game once they are satisfied. As a consequence, naive strategies that are in general unsuccessful, can be turned into winning strategies by switching to the appropriate two-pursuer game. Moreover, it is shown via numerical simulations that the switching mechanism significantly enhances the performance of existing pursuit algorithms, like those based on Voronoi partitions.