Controllers to Chase a High-Speed Evader Using a Pursuer with Variable Speed

Abstract

This paper proposes a chasing controller to enable a pursuer to chase a high-speed evader such that the relative distance between the evader and the pursuer monotonically decreases as time passes. Our controller is designed to assure that the angular rate of Line-of-Sight joining the pair (the pursuer and the evader) is exactly zero at all time indexes. Assuming that the pursuee can readily observe optical flow, but only poorly detect looming, this pursuer's movement is hardly detected by the pursuee. Consider the terminal phase when the pursuer is sufficiently close to the evader. As we slow down the relative speed of the pursuer with respect to the evader, we can reduce the probability of missing the high-speed evader. Thus, our strategy is to make the pursuer decrease its speed in the terminal phase, while ensuring that the distance between the evader and the pursuer monotonically decreases as time passes. The performance of our controller is verified utilizing MATLAB simulations.