Encirclement Guaranteed Finite-Time Capture against Unknown Evader Strategies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a pursuit strategy that guarantees finite-time capture and encirclement of an evader in a 2D environment, regardless of the evader's tactics, with proven bounds and numerical validation.

Contribution

It presents a novel class of pursuit strategies that ensure finite-time capture and encirclement without prior knowledge of the evader's heading, filling a gap in existing pursuit-evasion research.

Findings

Guarantees finite-time capture and encirclement regardless of evader strategy

Derives an upper bound on the time to capture

Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategies

Abstract

We consider a pursuit-evasion scenario involving a group of pursuers and a single evader in a two-dimensional unbounded environment. The pursuers aim to capture the evader in finite time while ensuring the evader remains enclosed within the convex hull of their positions until capture, without knowledge of the evader's heading angle. Prior works have addressed the problem of encirclement and capture separately in different contexts. In this paper, we present a class of strategies for the pursuers that guarantee capture in finite time while maintaining encirclement, irrespective of the evader's strategy. Furthermore, we derive an upper bound on the time to capture. Numerical results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed framework against a range of evader strategies.