Hide-and-Seek with Directional Sensing

: We consider a game played between a hider, who hides a static object in one of several possible positions in a bounded planar region, and a searcher who wishes to reach the object by querying sensors also distributed in the plane. The searcher is a mobile agent, and whenever it physically visits a sensor, the sensor returns a random direction, corresponding to a half-plane in which the hidden object is located. We first present a novel search heuristic and characterize bounds on the expected distance covered before reaching the object. Next, we model this game as a large-dimensional zero-sum feedback matrix game and we apply a recently introduced randomized sampling technique that provides a probabilistic level of security to the hider. We observe that, when the randomized sampling approach is only allowed to select a very small number of samples, the cost of the heuristic is comparable to the security level provided by the randomized procedure. However, as we allow the number of sa...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Alessandro Borri, Shaunak Dattaprasad Bopardikar, João Pedro Hespanha, Maria Domenica Di Benedetto
• Keywords: CORR 2011, Education, Randomized Procedure, Randomized Sampling, Sensor