Risk-Aware Switch-Time Recovery Planning (ReSwitch) for High-Speed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Pursuit–Evasion

UAV pursuit–evasion in multi-obstacle environments constitutes a safety-critical decision-making problem in which the pursuer must intercept a maneuvering evader while satisfying obstacle-avoidance constraints. Existing safety-constrained methods typically optimize expected safety costs or apply immediate interventions, but they do not explicitly determine when recovery should begin once finite-horizon risk emerges. To address this issue, we propose the ReSwitch framework, which separates task-oriented pursuit from safety-oriented recovery. When flight risk emerges, a value-preserving switch-time planner evaluates candidate switching times through opponent-conditioned hybrid rollouts. The feasible switch time with the largest pursuit value after recovery is selected for execution, allowing the controller to prioritize safety while preserving pursuit effectiveness whenever possible. Experiments demonstrate that ReSwitch achieves a mean success rate of 89.02% and a physical safety rate of 91.67%, showing favorable performance compared with the baselines. These results indicate that ReSwitch provides a favorable pursuit–safety trade-off under the tested conditions.