Defending a Perimeter from a Ground Intruder Using an Aerial Defender: Theory and Practice
This work addresses the gap between theoretical optimal strategies and practical implementation in robotics for perimeter defense, which is incremental as it builds on existing theory by incorporating real-world constraints.
The paper tackles the perimeter defense game by applying theoretical strategies to realistic robot models with actuation and sensing constraints, specifically in a hemisphere scenario with a ground intruder and aerial defender, and observes performance discrepancies through simulation and proposed metrics.
The perimeter defense game has received interest in recent years as a variant of the pursuit-evasion game. A number of previous works have solved this game to obtain the optimal strategies for defender and intruder, but the derived theory considers the players as point particles with first-order assumptions. In this work, we aim to apply the theory derived from the perimeter defense problem to robots with realistic models of actuation and sensing and observe performance discrepancy in relaxing the first-order assumptions. In particular, we focus on the hemisphere perimeter defense problem where a ground intruder tries to reach the base of a hemisphere while an aerial defender constrained to move on the hemisphere aims to capture the intruder. The transition from theory to practice is detailed, and the designed system is simulated in Gazebo. Two metrics for parametric analysis and comparative study are proposed to evaluate the performance discrepancy.