Surveillance Strategies for a Pursuer with Finite Sensor Range

This paper addresses the pursuit-evasion problem of maintaining surveillance by a pursuer of an evader in a world populated by polygonal obstacles. This requires the pursuer to plan collision-free motions that honor distance constraints imposed by sensor capabilities, while avoiding occlusion of the evader by any obstacle. We extend the three-dimensional cellular decomposition of Schwartz and Sharir to represent the four-dimensional configuration space of the pursuer-evader system, and derive necessary conditions for surveillance (equivalently, sufficient conditions for escape) in terms of this new representation. We then give a game theoretic formulation of the problem, and use this formulation to characterize optimal escape trajectories for the evader. We propose a shooting algorithm that finds these trajectories using the minimum principle. Finally, noting the similarities between this surveillance problem and the problem of cooperative manipulation by two robots, we present seve...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: IJRR
• Authors: Rafael Murrieta-Cid, Teja Muppirala, Alejandro Sarmiento, Sourabh Bhattacharya, Seth Hutchinson
• Keywords: Four-dimensional Configuration Space, IJRR 2007, Surveillance, Three-dimensional Cellular Decomposition