OA-ECBVC: A Cooperative Collision-free Encirclement and Capture Approach in Cluttered Environments

This article investigates the practical scenarios of chasing an adversarial evader in an unbounded environment with cluttered obstacles. We propose a Voronoi-based decentralized algorithm for multiple pursuers to encircle and capture the evader by reacting to collisions. An efficient approach is presented for constructing an obstacle-aware evader-centered bounded Voronoi cell (OA-ECBVC), which strictly ensures collision avoidance in various obstacle scenarios when pursuing the evader. The evader can be efficiently enclosed in a convex hull given random initial configurations. Furthermore, to cooperatively capture the evader, each pursuer continually compresses the boundary of its OA-ECBVC to quickly reduce the movement space of the evader while maintaining encirclement. Our OA-ECBVC algorithm is validated in various simulated environments with different dynamic systems of robots. Realtime performance of resisting uncertainties shows the superior reliability of our method for deployment on multiple robot platforms.