| In successive pursuit, a pursuer seeks to capture as many evaders as possible in succession in the shortest amount of time. At the same time, a coalition of evaders seeks to maximize capture time (or prevent capture entirely) with or without the knowledge of the pursuer's control law or preferred capture order. This study seeks to obtain a control strategy for both the pursuer and the coalition of evaders that is robust to uncertainty and variation in the pursuer or evader coalition strategy and that can be computed in a reasonable amount of time. A combination of techniques from differential game theory and discrete optimization are employed to compute such a strategy. In particular, a sub-optimal numerical approach using limited lookahead and a Monte Carlo tree search algorithm are used to obtain solutions in the presence of a high-dimensional action space. Examples are presented for both simple pursuit dynamics and the dynamics of the so-called Homicidal Chauffeur game.;This work is sponsored by the Department of the Air Force under Air Force Contract FA8721-05-C-0002. Opinions, interpretations, conclusions and recommendations are those of the author and are not necessarily endorsed by the United States Government. |
