Collaborative Interception of Moving Re-locatable Target

Abstract

This paper is dealing with a team of autonomous vehicles using on-board sensors for tracking and intercepting a moving target. The team of autonomous vehicles is composed of a pursuing vehicle and of several Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAVs). The on-board sensors we talk about have limited capabilities in terms of range. Before acquiring the target, the pursuing vehicle relies on external discrete time information. The target is a slow moving target with respect to the pursuer velocity. The pursuer and the evader are both ground mobile vehicles. The pursuer is able to decide when receiving target re-location information coming from UAVs. UAVs are flying in a cooperative manner with the pursuing vehicle. This situation has been described in terms of a zero-sum two-player pursuit-evasion differential game with costly information. The pursuer minimizes the time to reach the target, while the target tries to evade and to maximize the capture time. After solving this pursuit-evasion game for simple kinematics, test and evaluation simulations with more realistic kinematics have been performed. We also discuss the 4D guidance law and the coordination algorithm we implemented for managing the UAVs.