Coordinating Defender Path Planning for Optimal Target-Attacker-Defender Game

摘要

We present a path planning problem involving two vehicles cooperatively traveling in adversarial environment. The first vehicle is the lead vehicle and its path is prescribed to accomplish a certain mission, and there exists multiple attackers along this path. The second vehicle is a defender that travels with the lead vehicle, and it is responsible to protect the lead vehicle from the attackers, should the attackers attempt to engage with the lead vehicle. The defender launches defender missile to intercept the attackers before it reaches the lead vehicle. The defender and lead vehicle cooperate to maximize the distance between the lead vehicle and the point of interception, while the attacker tries to minimize this distance. This sub problem is modeled as a Target-Attacker-Defender (TAD) differential game. We aim to generate a path for the defender, such that if the TAD game is played at any point along the path, the defender should be optimally positioned to maximize the terminal separation distance. We reduce this problem to a discrete space, and pose it as a shortest path problem on a graph, the solution of which gives the discrete optimal path for the defender.