This paper introduces a novel and flexible simulation platform for studying pursuit and evasion in unknown 2-D environments of arbitrary obstacles, in an effort to expand the practical application of pursuit-evasion research. The platform provides realistic simulation of the sensing capability of each robotic agent (either a pursuer or an evader). Each agent uses real-time local sensing to coll...

Extending the notion of inheritable genotype in genetic programming (GP) from the common model of DNA into chromatin (DNA and histones), we propose an approach of embedding in GP an explicitly controlled gene expression via modification of histones. Proposed double-cell representation of individuals features somatic cell and germ cell, both represented by their respective chromatin structures. ...

In this paper, we present a game theoretic analysis of a visibility based pursuitevasion game in a planar environment containing obstacles. The pursuer and the evader are holonomic having bounded speeds. Both the players have a complete map of the environment. Both the players have omnidirectional vision and have knowledge about each other’s current position as long as they are visible to each ...

We consider the most basic visibility-based pursuit-evasion problem defined as follows: Given a polygonal region, a searcher with 360 vision, and an unpredictable intruder that is arbitrarily faster than the searcher, plan the motion of the searcher so as to see the intruder. In this paper, we present simple necessary and sufficient conditions for a polygon to be searchable, which settles a dec...

This paper addresses the problem of planning the motion of one or more pursuers in a polygonal environment to eventually \see" an evader that is unpredictable, has unknown initial position, and is capable of moving arbitrarily fast. This problem was rst introduced by Suzuki and Yamashita. Our study of this problem is motivated in part by robotics applications, such as surveillance with a mobile...

Cops and Robbers is a pursuit and evasion game played on graphs that has received much attention. We consider an extension of Cops and Robbers, distance k Cops and Robbers, where the cops win if at least one of them is of distance at most k from the robber in G. The cop number of a graph G is the minimum number of cops needed to capture the robber in G. The distance k analogue of the cop number...

We present a framework for solving pursuit evasion games in Rn for the case of N pursuers and a single evader. We give two algorithms that capture the evader in a number of steps linear in the original pursuer-evader distances. We also show how to generalize our results to a convex playing field with finitely many hyperplane boundaries that serve as obstacles.

In pursuit-evasion problems, we are presented with one or more pursuers attempting to capture one or more evaders. We consider pursuers and evaders limited by a maximum speed moving in the two-dimensional plane with obstacles. We then investigate two problems in this domain. In the first, where we are given the starting configuration of pursuers and evaders, we identify all possible paths by th...

Target detection and tracking encompasses a variety of problems such as coverage, search, patrolling, observing, pursuit-evasion, etc. These problems are studied by several communities, that tackle them using diverse formulations, hypotheses and approaches. This variety and the fact that target related robotics problems are pertinent for a large spectrum of applications has motivated a large am...