Partial Information Target Defense Game

Abstract

We formulate a scenario in which an autonomous defender is tasked with intercepting an intruder that tries to reach a circular target region. This is a variant of the target defense problem proposed by Isaacs as a pursuit-evasion game. Unlike the original target guarding problem and its various extensions, we consider the effect of partial information by imposing sensing limitation to the robots. We analyze the game by decomposing it into three game phases: deployment, asymmetric information, and engagement phase. Focusing on a particular parameter regime, we propose a simple defender strategy together with the lower bound on the probability that it wins the game. The defender strategy in each phase is constructed so that the subsequent phase starts in a desired initial configuration. The proposed problem is rich in terms of the parameter regimes that it contains, and thus is expected to be a useful platform in exploring effective control policies.