The problem considered in this section is formulated as follows.
It will be convenient to solve the problem by verifying that there is no evader. In other words, find a path for the pursuer that upon completion guarantees that there are no remaining places where the evader could be hiding. This ensures that during execution of the plan, the pursuer will encounter any evader. In fact, there can be any number of evaders, and the pursuer will find all of them. The approach systematically eliminates any possible places where evaders could hide.
The state yields the positions of the pursuer and the evader, , which results in the state space . Since the evader position is unknown, the current state is unknown, and I-spaces arise. The observation space is a collection of subsets of . For each , the sensor yields a visibility polygon, (this is denoted by using notation of Section 11.1.1). Consider the history I-state at time . The initial pursuer position is given (any position can be chosen arbitrarily, if it is not given), and the evader may lie anywhere in . The input history can be expressed as the pursuer history .12.5 Thus, the history I-state is
(12.33) |
Consider the nondeterministic I-space, . Since the pursuer position is always known, the interesting part of is the subset in which the evader may lie. Thus, the nondeterministic I-state can be expressed as , in which is the set of possible evader positions given . As usual for nondeterministic I-states, is the smallest set that is consistent with all of the information in .
Consider how varies over time. After the first instant of time, is observed, and it is known that the evader lies in , which is the shadow region (defined in Section 12.3.4) from . As the pursuer moves, varies. Suppose you are told that the pursuer is now at position , but you are not yet told . What options seem possible for ? These depend on the history, but the only interesting possibilities are that each shadow component may or may not contain the evader. For some of these components, we may be certain that it does not. For example, consider Figure 12.38. Suppose that the pursuer initially believes that the end of the corridor may contain the evader. If it moves along the smaller closed-loop path, the nondeterministic I-state gradually varies but returns to the same value when the loop is completed. However, if the pursuer traverses the larger loop, it becomes certain upon completing the loop that the corridor does not contain the evader. The dashed line that was crossed in this example may inspire you to think about cell decompositions based on critical boundaries, as in the algorithm in Section 6.3.4. This idea will be pursued shortly to develop a complete algorithm for solving this problem. Before presenting a complete algorithm, however, first consider some interesting examples.
Since one pursuer is incapable of solving some problems, it is tempting to wonder whether two pursuers can solve any problem. The next example gives an interesting sequence of environments that implies that for any positive integer , there is an environment that requires exactly pursuers to solve.
The problem can be made more challenging by considering multiply connected environments (environments with holes). A single pursuer cannot solve any of the these problems. Determining the minimum number of pursuers required to solve such a problem is NP-hard [414].
Steven M LaValle 2020-08-14