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. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.