Visibility Induction for Discretized Pursuit-Evasion Games

We study a two-player pursuit-evasion game, in which an agent moving amongst obstacles is to be maintained within “sight” of a pursuing robot. Using a discretization of the environment, our main contribution is to design an efficient algorithm that decides, given initial positions of both pursuer and evader, if the evader can take any moving strategy to go out of sight of the pursuer at any time instant. If that happens, we say that the evader wins the game. We analyze the algorithm, present several optimizations and show results for different environments. For situations where the evader cannot win, we compute, in addition, a pursuit strategy that keeps the evader within sight, for every strategy the evader can take. Finally, if it is determined that the evader wins, we compute its optimal escape trajectory and the corresponding optimal