Visibility-Based Pursuit-Evasion with Limited Field of View

We study the visibility-based pursuit-evasion problem, in which one or more searchers must move through a given environment so as to guarantee detection of any and all evaders, which can move arbitrarily fast. Our goal is to develop techniques for coordinating teams of robots to execute this task in application domains such as clearing a building, for reasons of security or safety. To this end, we introduce a new class of searcher, the φ-searcher, which can be readily instantiated as a physical mobile robot. We present a detailed analysis of the pursuit-evasion problem using φ-searchers. We present the first complete search algorithm for a single φ-searcher, show how this algorithm can be extended to handle multiple searchers, and give examples of computed trajectories. KEY WORDS—pursuit-evasion, computational geometry, exact cell decomposition path-planning