Abstract-This paper presents a new approach for the pursuit of targets by a team of aerial and ground robots under realistic conditions. Mobile target pursuit is often a sub-task of more general scenarios, that call for environment exploration or monitoring activities. Since most of the time a single robot is sufficient to ensure the pursuit of a target, our approach aims at minimizing the team resources devoted to the pursuit: while ensuring the pursuit, a single pursuer evaluates its own potential failures on the basis of the situation defined by the target evolution and the environment structure. It thus assesses its need for team support. When support is necessary to keep the target in view, one or more additional robots are involved, according to a task allocation scheme. We provide mathematical bounds of the complexity of the approach, that ensure that the system has real-time performance. Simulations in a variety of realistic situations illustrate the efficiency of the proposed solution.
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