Tracking Mobile Intruders in an Art Gallery: Guard Deployment Strategies, Fundamental Limitations, and Performance Guarantees

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of tracking mobile intruders in a polygonal environment. We assume that a team of diagonal guards is deployed inside the polygon to provide mobile coverage. First, we formulate the problem of tracking a mobile intruder inside a polygonal environment as a multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) problem. Leveraging on guard deployment strategies in art gallery problems for mobile coverage, we show that the problem of finding the minimum speed of guards to persistently track a single mobile intruder is NP-hard. Next, for a given maximum speed of the intruder and the guards, we propose a technique to partition a polygon, and compute a feasible allocation of guards to the partitions. We prove the correctness of the proposed algorithm, and show its completeness for a specific class of inputs. We classify the guards based on the structural properties of the partitions allocated to them. Based on the classification, we propose motion strategy for the guards to track the mobile intruder when it is located in the partition allocated to the guard. Finally, we extend the proposed technique to address guard deployment and allocation strategies for non-simple polygons and multiple intruders.