Cooperative pursuit with Voronoi partitions

This work considers a pursuit–evasion game in which a number of pursuers are attempting to capture a single evader. Cooperation among multiple agents can be difficult to achieve, as it may require the selection of actions in the joint input space of all agents. This work presents a decentralized, real-time algorithm for cooperative pursuit of a single evader by multiple pursuers in bounded, simply-connected planar domains. The algorithm is based on minimizing the area of the generalized Voronoi partition of the evader. The pursuers share state information but compute their inputs independently. No assumptions are made about the evader’s control strategies other than requiring the evader control inputs to conform to a speed limit. Proof of guaranteed capture is shown when the domain is convex and the players’ motion models are kinematic. Simulation results are presented showing the efficiency and effectiveness of this strategy.