Optimal Evasive Path Planning with Velocity Constraint

Pursuit evasion is an important category of mobile robotics application related to surveillance, spying and gathering ambient information. This paper presents a novel optimal approach to evasion planning, considering physical limitations of the environment and the evader. The results show that the proposed formulation is applicable irrespective of the number of pursuing agents and the relative velocities of the pursuers and the evader, contrary to the traditional requirement that evasion strategies need to be configured according to situation-dependent cases. The proposed policy is generic and can be implemented in real-time by iterative optimization using model predictive controllers, the objective being avoidance of capture or at the least, maximizing the capture time.