A Family of Switching Pursuit Strategies for a Multi-Pursuer Single-Evader Game

Abstract

This paper introduces a new family of pursuit strategies for multi-pursuer single-evader games in a planar environment. They leverage conditions under which the minimum-time solution of the game becomes equivalent to that of a suitable two-pursuer single-evader game. This enables the design of strategies in which the pursuers first aim to meet such conditions, and then transition to a two-pursuer game once they are satisfied. As a consequence, naive strategies that are in general unsuccessful, can be turned into winning strategies by switching to the appropriate two-pursuer game. Moreover, it is shown via numerical simulations that the switching mechanism significantly enhances the performance of existing pursuit algorithms, like those based on Voronoi partitions.