Multiagent Pursuit Evasion, or Playing Kabaddi

Abstract

We study a version of pursuit evasion where two or more pursuers are required to capture the evader because the evader is able to overpower a single defender. The pursuers must coordinate their moves to fortify their approach against the evader while the evader maneuvers to disable pursuers from their unprotected sides. We model this situation as a game of Kabaddi, a popular South Asian sport where two teams occupy opposite halves of a field and take turns sending an attacker into the other half, in order to win points by tagging or wrestling members of the opposing team, while holding his breath during the attack. The game involves team coordination and movement strategies, making it non-trivial to formally model and analyze, yet provides an elegant framework for the study of multiagent pursuitevasion, for instance, a team of robots attempting to capture a rogue agent. Our paper introduces a simple discrete (time and space) model for the game, offers analysis of winning strategies, and explores tradeoffs between maximum movement speed, number of pursuers, and locational constraints. 1

Wheeled Robots playing Chain Catch: Strategies and Evaluation

“…There is work done on simulating robot games as Multiagent systems like Robo-soccer [7,3,12] and pursuit domain games such as man and lion game [11,10] and traditional pursuit evasion [4,14,14]. However, there has not been any work in direction of implementing Chain Catch as a multirobot system.…”

“…Hence when two are in vicinity of each other as shown in part (3), we consider it to be a Catch. The chain expands every time a Catch occurs (Figure 5, part (3,4,5,6)). Here chain moves with Tagging approach.…”

“…We implement robotic agents playing Chain Catch, which is a common multi-player playground game that requires strategic decision making and cooperation among chain members to stay together (as a chain) while catching another player whereas other players to compete with chain to escape from getting caught. Simulating robot games like Robosoccer and Robot pursuit evasion games have been a topic of extensive research in the field of Multi-Robot systems [4,7,14]. Our game starts as simple Catch-Catch or "tag" game that falls under pursuit domain problems.…”

Anticipatory Planning for Human-Robot Teams

“…We refer the reader to [4] for a survey of the works in this area and discuss some relevant ideas here. Many multi-agent algorithms exist for di↵erent tasks which range from fully cooperative setting [22,16,48] to fully competitive setting [23,15]. When collaborating with humans, the robot needs to be aware of the human's behavior, which might not always be fully cooperative.…”