Biologically inspired interception: A comparison of pursuit and constant bearing strategies in the presence of sensorimotor delay

Abstract

We investigate the effect of sensorimotor delay on the pursuit and interception control strategies in the context of robotics. A first-order lead-lag model is introduced to model interception as observed in nature. This model was studied via extensive simulations that incorporate both a sensorimotor delay and a compensatory feedforward controller, allowing examination of the effects of various sensorimotor delays over a range of target velocity to pursuer velocity ratios. It was found that, with appropriate tuning, both the pursuit and constant bearing strategies operate effectively over a wide range of sensorimotor delays. Additionally, for each strategy, the use of a generalised mean value for this gain provides near-optimal performance, compared to separately optimising the gain for each combination of velocity ratio and delay. Finally, it is demonstrated that the constant bearing approach intercepts the target approximately 20% faster, on average, than the pursuit strategy across varying delays.