Target Defense against Sequentially Arriving Attackers
A. Pourghorban, M. Dorothy, D. Shishika, A. Von Moll, D. Maity
Published in Conference on Decision and Control, 2022
We consider a variant of the target defense problem where a single defender is tasked to capture a sequence of incoming intruders. The intruders’ objective is to breach the target boundary without being captured by the defender. As soon as the current intruder breaches the target or gets captured by the defender, the next intruder appears at a random location on a fixed circle surrounding the target. Therefore, the defender’s final location at the end of the current game becomes its initial location for the next game. Thus, the players pick strategies that are advantageous for the current as well as for the future games. Depending on the information available to the players, each game is divided into two phases: partial information and full information phase. Under some assumptions on the sensing and speed capabilities, we analyze each agent’s strategy in both phases. We derive equilibrium strategies for both the players to optimize the capture percentage using the notions of engagement surface and capture circle. We quantify the percentage of capture for both finite and infinite sequences of incoming intruders.