Optimal Multi-robot Perimeter Defense Using Flow Networks

Austin K. Chen, Douglas G. Macharet, Daigo Shishika, George J. Pappas, Vijay Kumar

Abstract: In perimeter defense, a team of defenders seeks to intercept a team of intruders before they reach the perimeter. Though the single defender case is relatively well studied, with multiple defenders significant complexity is introduced because coordination must also be considered. In this work, we present a formulation of the perimeter defense problem as an instance of the min-cost-max-flow problem for flow networks, and leverage existing efficient algorithms for network flows to solve both the task assignment and routing problems for perimeter defense concurrently. When considering homogeneous defender robots, the computed solution is optimal for any individual timestep. Additionally, we detail a deconflict-based strategy for dealing with heterogeneous defenders, and show in simulation that the proposed solutions match or outperform a naive greedy baseline.