UNCC College of Computing and Informatics

Graduate Seminar (2009 Fall)

Title: Pursuit & Evasion in an Unknown Environment

Jonathan Annas

Ph.D student

Department of Computer Science

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

October 9 at 3:00pm
106 Woodward

Abstract:

Pursuit and Evasion is an area of robotics and intelligent systems that encompasses a broad scope of problem formulations. The base context of these problems is that one or more agents must 'catch' another agent. As a relatively young field, much of the work done has reduced agents to a point robot and environments are often represented as a known connected graph or grid. We introduce a novel and flexible simulation platform for studying pursuit and evasion in unknown 2-D environments of arbitrary obstacles, in an effort to expand the practical application of pursuit- evasion research. The platform provides realistic simulation of the sensing capability of each robotic agent (either a pursuer or an evader). Each agent uses real-time local sensing to collect information from the environment while it simultaneously plans and executes its motion to best satisfy one or more objectives. The evader's objectives are to reach a specific goal location as quickly as possible and to avoid being caught by the pursuer. The pursuer's objectives are to locate and capture the evader whose motion is unknown, and when the evader is not seen, explore the environment and predict where the evader may be. Under a common real-time planning paradigm, each agent's planner dynamically adapts its goals and objectives to the agent's changing circumstances so that the agent can always choose the best course of action. Simulation results have shown that the introduced approach is an effective means to study sophisticated pursuit-evasion scenarios and accomplish objectives for both the pursuer and the evader in an unknown environment. The platform can be easily expanded to accommodate multiple agents in more complex pursuit-evasion tasks.

Bio:

Jonathan Annas is currently a second year PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte under the advisement of Dr. Jing Xiao. His primary research focuses include: pursuit and evasion for mobile robots, real-time simultaneous mapping and planning in unknown environments, and navigation using evolutionary algorithms. His current work involves the development of a new platform for simulating algorithms related to these research areas.

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