Search for Smart Evaders With Swarms of Sweeping Agents

Roee M. Francos, Alfred M. Bruckstein

Abstract:

Suppose in a given planar region, there are smart
mobile evaders and we want to detect them using sweeping agents.
We assume that the agents have line sensors of equal length. We
propose procedures for designing cooperative sweeping processes
that ensure successful completion of the task, thereby deriving
conditions on the sweeping velocity of the agents and their paths.
Successful completion of the taskmeans that evaders with a known
limit on their velocity cannot escape detection by the sweeping
agents. A simpler task for the sweeping swarm is the confinement
of the evaders to their initial domain. The feasibility of completing
these tasks depends on geometric and dynamic constraints that
impose a lower bound on the velocity the sweeping agent must
have. This critical velocity is derived to ensure the achievement
of the confinement task. Increasing the velocity above the lower
bound enables the agents to complete the search task as well. We
present results on the total search time for two types of novel
pincer-movement search processes, circular and spiral, for any even
number of sweeping agents. The proposed spiral process allows
detection of all evaders while sweeping at velocities that approach
the theoretical lower bound.