Cooperative defense of a territorial-constrained target in a target-attacker-defender game

Abstract Multi-player pursuit-evasion games are crucial for addressing the maneuver decision problem arising in the cooperative control of multi-agent systems. This paper presents a cooperative defense strategy involving cooperation and confrontation among the target, attacker, and multiple defenders based on location information only. The primary objective of the attacker is to capture the target while avoiding being captured by multiple defenders. Meanwhile, the target is confined to a restricted area and can only move within its boundaries. The proposed cooperative defense strategy aims to prevent the attacker from capturing the target while minimizing the time required to neutralize the threat. Therefore, the multiple defenders are classified into two categories: the primary defender and the auxiliary defenders. The primary defender is to prevent the attacker from approaching the target by predicting the intention of the attacker. On the other hand, the auxiliary defenders adopt a surround-shrink-capture strategy to reduce the time consumption to capture the attacker. Numerical simulations have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.