Pursuer Coordination in Multi-Player Reach-Avoid Games Through Control Barrier Functions

This letter addresses the problem of coordinating a team of pursuers to capture a fast evader in reach-avoid games. Coordination is achieved through the minimization of a locational cost objective, which results in a coverage control strategy. Coverage control dynamics are equivalently expressed as consensus dynamics. This formulation is used to guarantee optimal coverage of an implicit defense manifold without needing to rely on projection mappings as in previous works. Control barrier functions (CBFs) are used to guarantee the existence of a pursuer-defendable defense manifold for as long as feasible throughout the engagement and guarantee capture. A greedy evader strategy is proposed in terms of the solution to a quadratically constrained quadratic program, and simulation results are presented comparing the performance of an uncoordinated strategy and a pure coverage strategy to the proposed coordinated CBF strategy.