Target Defense against Sequentially Arriving Intruders

We consider a variant of the target defense problem where a single defender is tasked to capture a sequence of incoming intruders. The intruders’ objective is to breach the target boundary without being captured by the defender. As soon as the current intruder breaches the target or gets captured by the defender, the next intruder appears at a random location on a fixed circle surrounding the target. Therefore, the defender’s final location at the end of the current game becomes its initial location for the next game. Thus, the players pick strategies that are advantageous for the current as well as for the future games. Depending on the information available to the players, each game is divided into two phases: partial information and full information phase. Under some assumptions on the sensing and speed capabilities, we analyze the agents’ strategies in both phases. We derive equilibrium strategies for both the players to optimize the capture percentage using the notions of engagement surface and capture circle. We quantify the percentage of capture for both finite and infinite sequences of incoming intruders.

[1]  S. Karaman,et al.  The Role of Heterogeneity in Autonomous Perimeter Defense Problems , 2022, WAFR.

[2]  Alexander Von Moll,et al.  One Apollonius Circle is Enough for Many Pursuit-Evasion Games , 2021, 2111.09205.

[3]  Alexander Von Moll,et al.  Competitive Perimeter Defense of Conical Environments , 2021, 2022 IEEE 61st Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).

[4]  Zongying Shi,et al.  Receding Horizon Defense Strategy for Reach-Avoid Games with Uncertainties via Pairwise Outcomes , 2021, 2021 40th Chinese Control Conference (CCC).

[5]  M. Dorothy,et al.  Partial Information Target Defense Game , 2021, 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[6]  George J. Pappas,et al.  Adaptive Partitioning for Coordinated Multi-agent Perimeter Defense , 2020, 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

[7]  Eloy Garcia,et al.  Optimal Strategies for a Class of Multi-Player Reach-Avoid Differential Games in 3D Space , 2020, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

[8]  Daigo Shishika,et al.  Cooperative Team Strategies for Multi-Player Perimeter-Defense Games , 2019, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

[9]  M. Ani Hsieh,et al.  Team Composition for Perimeter Defense with Patrollers and Defenders , 2019, 2019 IEEE 58th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).

[10]  Shaunak D. Bopardikar,et al.  Dynamic Boundary Guarding Against Radially Incoming Targets , 2019, 2019 IEEE 58th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).

[11]  Fang Deng,et al.  A differential game for cooperative target defense , 2019, Autom..

[12]  Pierre T. Kabamba,et al.  Pursuit-evasion games in the presence of obstacles , 2016, Autom..

[13]  Mo Chen,et al.  A path defense approach to the multiplayer reach-avoid game , 2014, 53rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[14]  João Pedro Hespanha,et al.  On Discrete-Time Pursuit-Evasion Games With Sensing Limitations , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[15]  Sourabh Bhattacharya,et al.  On the Existence of Nash Equilibrium for a Two-player Pursuit - Evasion Game with Visibility Constraints , 2008, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[16]  Ameer K. Mulla,et al.  Finite-Time Consensus Tracking of Multi-Agent Systems Using Time-Fuel Optimal Pursuit Evasion , 2022, IEEE Control Systems Letters.