| 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 nstantiated
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. |
