Multi-to-One Minimum-Time Impulsive Pursuit-Evasion Based on Reachable Domain Coverage

This paper studies the multi-to-one minimum-time impulsive pursuit-evasion problem based on the reachable domain (RD) coverage. Firstly, under the linear relative motion near elliptic orbits, an analytical expression for the fixed-time multi-impulse RD is derived. Secondly, based on the fixed-time multi-impulse RD, the RD coverage constraints are transformed into inequality constraints, and then a multi-to-one minimum-time impulsive pursuit-evasion problem is established. Finally, an initialization method is proposed to determine the initial values of the optimization variables. Numerical results show that the proposed method can rapidly calculate the fixed-time multi-impulse RD, which is consistent with the results of the Monte Carlo method. In addition, by using the proposed method, multiple pursuers can successfully capture one evader under different evasion strategies.