Anticipated velocity based guidance strategy for wheeled mobile evader amidst stationary and moving obstacles in bounded environment

Abstract

AbstractThis paper is concerned with a class of pursuit‐evasion game problems amidst stationary and moving obstacles in a bounded environment. We concentrate on evader's strategy taking into account the following challenges: (i) pursuer and evader are nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots and the evader is slower than the pursuer; (ii) pursuer follows a proportional navigation law; and (iii) geometry of the environment is not known to the players, a priori. We propose an efficient evader‐centric anticipated velocity based guidance strategy. Pursuer's trajectory is anticipated at each step by the evader using quadratic polynomial interpolation. The aim of the evader is to escape interception with the pursuer for maximum possible time. To deal with static obstacles, a technique based on a well‐known tangent bug algorithm is presented. While dealing with dynamic obstacles, a recently introduced reciprocal orientation method is employed to avoid collision in situations when the dynamic obstacle also cooperates in the process. In case dynamic obstacles do not participate in the process of collision avoidance, a well‐known velocity obstacle method is employed for planning safe collision‐free paths. Efficiency of the proposed algorithms is analyzed with respect to the interception time and the distance traveled by the players. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.