Pursuit-evasion in 2.5d based on team-visibility

In this paper we present an approach for a pursuit-evasion problem that considers a 2.5d environment represented by a height map. Such a representation is particularly suitable for large-scale outdoor pursuit-evasion, captures some aspects of 3d visibility and can include target heights. In our approach we construct a graph representation of the environment by sampling strategic locations and computing their detection sets, an extended notion of visibility. From the graph we compute strategies using previous work on graph-searching. These strategies are used to coordinate the robot team and to generate paths for all robots using an appropriate classification of the terrain. In experiments we investigate the performance of our approach and provide examples including a sample map with multiple loops and elevation plateaus and two realistic maps, a village and a mountain range. To the best of our knowledge the presented approach is the first viable solution to 2.5d pursuit-evasion with height maps.