Cooperative Containment Strategies to Pursue One Faster Evader with Collision Avoidance

On the surface of complex sea areas with obstacles, the encirclement mission against one hostile unmanned surface vehicle (USV) with high capability is usually extremely challenging. Especially when the evasion USV is endowed with a higher speed, the pursuit USVs are more likely to fail. In this work, the containment strategies by multiple low-speed pursuit USVs to capture one high-speed evasion USV considering collision avoidance are studied. On the basis of the conventional artificial potential field (APF) method, we first design a virtual target point to replace the actual evasion USV, which will help the pursuit USVs better implement the surrounding behavior. Thereafter, we reset the triggering conditions of the APF method to avoid the unnecessary obstacle avoidance actions. The proposed strategies can help the pursuit USVs better accomplish the containment strategies while bypassing the obstacles. Simulation experiments have verified the effectiveness of the designed cooperative containment strategies.