Cooperative Target Defense under Communication and Sensing Constraints

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decentralized control strategy for a team of defenders with sensing and communication constraints to capture an intruder, transforming the problem into a nonlinear consensus challenge and providing conditions for success.

Contribution

It develops a novel decentralized feedback approach for target defense with limited sensing and communication, and derives conditions for successful capture.

Findings

The strategy achieves successful capture under certain speed and communication conditions.

Decentralized control effectively manages sensing limitations.

Numerical simulations validate the proposed approach.

Abstract

We consider a variant of the target defense problems where a group of defenders are tasked to simultaneously capture an intruder. The intruder's objective is to reach a target without being simultaneously captured by the defender team. Some of the defenders are sensing-limited and do not have any information regarding the intruder's position or velocity at any time. The defenders may communicate with each other using a connected communication graph. We propose a decentralized feedback strategy for the defenders, which transforms the simultaneous capture problem into a unique nonlinear consensus problem. We derive a sufficient condition for simultaneous capture in terms of the agents' speeds, sensing, and communication capabilities. The proposed decentralized controller is evaluated through extensive numerical simulations.