A Pursuit-Evasion Toolkit

Abstract

This tutorial contains tools and techniques for designing pursuit and evasion strategies. The material targets a diverse audience including STEM educators as well as robotics researchers interested in applications of pursuit-evasion games.

We start with a simple "lion and man" game in a square environment which should be accessible to anyone with a high-school level background on geometry and trigonometry. We then visit various versions of this game with increasing complexity. Rather than surveying specific results for specific environments, the tutorial highlights broadly applicable techniques and strategies. It also includes exercises for STEM educators as well as open problems for robotics researchers.