Cooperative Target Defense under Communication and Sensing Constraints

Abstract: We consider a variant of the target defense problems where a group of defenders are tasked to simultaneously capture an intruder. The intruder's objective is to reach a target without being simultaneously captured by the defender team. Some of the defenders are sensing-limited and do not have any information regarding the intruder's position or velocity at any time. The defenders may communicate with each other using a connected communication graph. We propose a decentralized feedback strategy for the defenders, which transforms the simultaneous capture problem into a unique nonlinear consensus problem. We derive a sufficient condition for simultaneous capture in terms of the agents' speeds, sensing, and communication capabilities. The proposed decentralized controller is evaluated through extensive numerical simulations.