Experimental Evaluation of Certain Pursuit and Evasion Schemes for Wheeled Mobile Robots

Pursuit-evasion games involving mobile robots provide an excellent platform to analyze the performance of pursuit and evasion strategies. Pursuit-evasion has received considerable attention from researchers in the past few decades due to its application to a broad spectrum of problems that arise in various domains such as defense research, robotics, computer games, drug delivery, cell biology, etc. Several methods have been introduced in the literature to compute the winning chances of a single pursuer or single evader in a two-player game. Over the past few decades, proportional navigation guidance (PNG) based methods have proved to be quite effective for the purpose of pursuit especially for missile navigation and target tracking. However, a performance comparison of these pursuer-centric strategies against recent evader-centric schemes has not been found in the literature, for wheeled mobile robot applications. With a view to understanding the performance of each of the evasion strategies against various pursuit strategies and vice versa, four different proportional navigation-based pursuit schemes have been evaluated against five evader-centric schemes and vice-versa for non-holonomic wheeled mobile robots. The pursuer′s strategies include three well-known schemes namely, augmented ideal proportional navigation guidance (AIPNG), modified AIPNG, angular acceleration guidance (AAG), and a recently introduced pursuer-centric scheme called anticipated trajectory-based proportional navigation guidance (ATPNG). Evader-centric schemes are classic evasion, random motion, optical-flow based evasion, Apollonius circle based evasion and another recently introduced evasion strategy called anticipated velocity based evasion. The performance of each of the pursuit methods was evaluated against five different evasion methods through hardware implementation. The performance was analyzed in terms of time of interception and the distance traveled by players. The working environment was obstacle-free and the maximum velocity of the pursuer was taken to be greater than that of the evader to conclude the game in finite time. It is concluded that ATPNG performs better than other PNG-based schemes, and the anticipated velocity based evasion scheme performs better than the other evasion schemes.