A Distributed Pipeline for Collaborative Pursuit in the Target Guarding Problem

The target guarding problem (TGP) is a classical combat game where pursuers aim to capture evaders to protect a territory from intrusion. This paper proposes a distributed pipeline for multi-pursuer multi-evader TGP with the capability to accommodate varying numbers of evaders and criteria for successful pursuit. The pipeline integrates a cooperative encirclement-oriented distributed model predictive control (CEO-DMPC) method with a collaborative grouping strategy for trajectory planning of pursuers. This integration achieves cooperation and collision avoidance during the capture process across various scenarios. Besides, the objective function of CEO-DMPC employs sequences of predicted states instead of only a terminal state. Evaders are guided by the artificial potential field (APF) policy to reach their goals without being captured. Simulations with different parameters are conducted to validate the whole pipeline and the experiment results are illustrated and analyzed.