Encirclement Guaranteed Finite-Time Capture against Unknown Evader Strategies

2026-03-16

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of achieving finite-time capture while maintaining encirclement in a two-dimensional unbounded environment with multiple pursuers facing an evader employing an unknown evasion strategy. The paper proposes a cooperative control strategy that does not rely on knowledge of the evader’s heading information. By integrating convex hull-based geometric analysis, distributed control, and finite-time stability theory, the approach uniquely guarantees—within a unified framework—both persistent encirclement and finite-time capture for any evasion strategy. A rigorous upper bound on the capture time is explicitly derived. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed strategy across a variety of evasion scenarios.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: State Estimation
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Cooperative Game Theory

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: LLM based quality controls for crowd work
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship

Abstract

We consider a pursuit-evasion scenario involving a group of pursuers and a single evader in a two-dimensional unbounded environment. The pursuers aim to capture the evader in finite time while ensuring the evader remains enclosed within the convex hull of their positions until capture, without knowledge of the evader's heading angle. Prior works have addressed the problem of encirclement and capture separately in different contexts. In this paper, we present a class of strategies for the pursuers that guarantee capture in finite time while maintaining encirclement, irrespective of the evader's strategy. Furthermore, we derive an upper bound on the time to capture. Numerical results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed framework against a range of evader strategies.

Problem

• pursuit-evasion
• encirclement
• finite-time capture
• unknown evader strategy
• convex hull

Innovation

• finite-time capture
• encirclement guarantee
• unknown evader strategy
• convex hull containment
• pursuit-evasion