Pursuit Techniques on Pioneer Robots

Abstract

This summer's research goal was to investigate different types of pursuit games. We seeked to develop feedback controls laws that will realize strategies such as classical pursuit, constant bearing pursuit, and motion camouflage. The latter being a strategy used in nature, for example, when hoverflies chase possible mates or when dragonflies engage in aerial territorial battles. (Echolocating bats hunt insect prey using a constant absolute target direction (CATD) strategy which is geometrically indistinguishable from motion camouflage.) These algorithms were implemented on the Pioneer robots using the high level motion control language MDLe. We also implemented an extended Kalman filter to improve the position estimation provided by the Cricket sensors.