Departmental Papers (CIS)
Date of this Version
October 2005
Document Type
Journal Article
Recommended Citation
Volkan Isler, Sampath Kannan, and Sanjeev Khanna, "Randomized Pursuit–Evasion in a Polygonal Environment", . October 2005.
Abstract
This paper contains two main results. First, we revisit the well-known visibility-based pursuit–evasion problem, and show that in contrast to deterministic strategies, a single pursuer can locate an unpredictable evader in any simply connected polygonal environment, using a randomized strategy. The evader can be arbitrarily faster than the pursuer, and it may know the position of the pursuer at all times, but it does not have prior knowledge of the random decisions made by the pursuer. Second, using the randomized algorithm, together with the solution to a problem called the “lion and man problem” as subroutines, we present a strategy for two pursuers (one of which is at least as fast as the evader) to quickly capture an evader in a simply connected polygonal environment. We show how this strategy can be extended to obtain a strategy for a polygonal room with a door, two pursuers who have only line-of-sight communication, and a single pursuer (at the expense of increased capture time).
Keywords
Dynamic noncooperative game theory, path planning, pursuit-evasion games, randomized algorithms
Date Posted: 03 March 2006
This document has been peer reviewed.
Comments
Copyright 2005 IEEE. Reprinted from IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Volume 21, Issue 5, October 2005, pages 875-884.
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