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Bioinspired cooperative control method of a pursuer group vs. a faster evader in a limited area

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Abstract

The problem of a faster evader hunted by Np pursuers in a limited area has been a significant subject in recent years. Nevertheless, it is still challenging to develop a cooperative strategy for pursuers and an escape strategy with boundary restrictions for the evader. We solved this problem using an artificial potential function and set several interaction rules inspired by some basic concepts from ecology to achieve the pursuit and evasion phenomena. In this paper, a decentralized, real-time strategy called the dynamic cooperative hunting strategy based on the head-pursuit mechanism and the combined escape strategy is proposed. The pursuers share state information but compute their control inputs independently. For pursuers, the head-pursuit mechanism enhances each pursuer’s cognitive prediction ability. A dynamic repulsive force between pursuers is introduced to improve the cooperative ability, which enables the pursuer group to be more adaptive in a rapidly changing situation. For the evader, the combined escape strategy consists of three escape actions, namely, direct escape, border escape, and gap escape. The evader can adopt any of the three actions to escape based on the real-time relative position between each pursuer and itself and between the boundaries and itself. In addition, evaluation functions (survival time) are defined to quantify the pursuit-evasion. Extensive simulations validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. Moreover, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has application potential in mobile robots.

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All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article.

Code Availability

Our code is currently not open source.

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Funding

This work was supported in part by the Aviation Science Foundation of China under Grant 2020Z023053001.

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    Authors and Affiliations

    1. Northwestern Polytechnical University, Dongxiang road, Xiaan, 710072, Shaanxi, China

      Xiaowei Fu, Yuxuan Zhang, Jindong Zhu & Qianglong Wang

    2. AVIC Shenyang Aircraft Design & Research Institute, Shenyang, 110035, Liaoning, China

      Jindong Zhu

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    1. Xiaowei Fu
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    2. Yuxuan Zhang
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    Contributions

    Xiaowei Fu developed the idea of the study and revised the manuscript, Yuxuan Zhang, Jindong Zhu and Qianglong Wang built the simulation model and wrote the draft paper.

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    Correspondence to Xiaowei Fu.

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    Yuxuan Zhang, Jindong Zhu and Qianglong Wang contributed equally to this work

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    Fu, X., Zhang, Y., Zhu, J. et al. Bioinspired cooperative control method of a pursuer group vs. a faster evader in a limited area. Appl Intell 53, 6736–6752 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-022-03892-8

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