Mutual Support by Sensor-Attacker Team for a Passive Target

We introduce a pursuit game played between a team of a sensor and an attacker and a mobile target in the unbounded Euclidean plane. The target is faster than the sensor, but slower than the attacker. The sensor’s objective is to keep the target within a sensing radius so that the attacker can capture the target, whereas the target seeks to escape by reaching beyond the sensing radius from the sensor without getting captured by the attacker. We assume that as long as the target is within the sensing radius from the sensor, the sensor-attacker team is able to measure the target’s instantaneous position and velocity. We pose and solve this problem as a game of kind in which the target uses an open-loop strategy (passive target). Aside from the novel formulation, our contributions are four-fold. First, we present optimal strategies for both the sensor and the attacker, according to their respective objectives. Specifically, we design a sensor strategy that maximizes the duration for which the target remains within its sensing range, while the attacker uses proportional navigation to capture the target. Second, we characterize the sensable region – the region in the plane in which the target remains within the sensing radius of the sensor during the game – and show that capture is guaranteed if and only if the Apollonius circle between the attacker and the target is fully contained within this region. Third, we derive a lower bound on the target’s speed below which capture is guaranteed, and an upper bound on the target speed above which there exists an escape strategy for the target, from an arbitrary initial orientation between the agents. Fourth, for a given initial orientation between the agents, we present a sharper upper bound on the target speed above which there exists an escape strategy for the target.