Heterogeneous Pursuit of an Active Target Under Sensing Constraints

P. Surve, S. Bopardikar, A. Von Moll, I. Weintraub, and D. Casbeer

Published in American Control Conference (Submitted for Review), 2026

This paper studies a heterogeneous three-agent pursuit-evasion scenario in which a sensor–attacker team attempts to capture an active target capable of changing its heading at fixed time intervals. The sensor has a limited sensing range, and the attacker must intercept the target before it escapes sensing. We formulate this problem as a game of kind and extend the optimal sensor and attacker strategies from prior work on passive targets to the active target setting. The sensor updates its heading in each interval by assuming that the target will keep its heading fixed for the rest of the engagement, while the attacker uses an Apollonius circle-based approach for minimum-time interception and updating its heading corresponding to the target heading in every interval. The main result of this letter is to show that the conditions for capture or escape of a passive target also extend to the case of an active targets. In particular, if the speed of the active target is less than a critical value – which is the same as for the case of passive targets from our prior work, then capture is guaranteed.