A cooperative receding horizon controller for multi-target interception with Obstacle Avoidance

Most of the proposed methods in literature on multi-target interception and related problems such as pursuit-evasion still suffer from a major drawback: They do not account for the uncertainties inherited in the environment in many applications. In the authors' previous work, multi-target interception problem was investigated where uncertainties in the environment stem from the fact that targets were assumed to be moving objects with a priori unknown arrival times, positions and trajectories. In this paper, in addition to these uncertainties, the mission space is also assumed to contain obstacles. The problem is formulated as a reward collection mission, and subsequently, a cooperative receding horizon controller is utilized toward maximizing the total collected reward. Inspired by the urban areas, the cases with polygonal obstacles are discussed. The introduced scheme is then adapted to improve the computational efficacy of algorithm. Analytical aspects of problem are discussed. The effectiveness and advantages of the proposed algorithm are demonstrated via numerical simulations.