Pursuing an evader through cooperative relaying in multi-agent surveillance networks

We provide a distributed control strategy for each mobile agent in a surveillance network in the plane to cooperatively pursue an evader. The pursuit task is relayed from one agent to another when the evader crosses the boundary of the Voronoi regions divided according to the agents' positions. The dynamics of the resulted cooperative relay-pursuit network are described by a novel model of impulsive systems. As a result, to guarantee the stability of the closed-loop network system, the controllers' gains are chosen effectively using the solution of an algebraic Riccati equation. The proof of the stability is based on the construction of a switched Lyapunov function. We also show that the proposed controller is able to deal with delays if some sufficient conditions in the form of a set of linear inequalities are satisfied. A numerical example is provided to validate the performance of the proposed controller. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.