Multi-Robot Adversarial Patrolling Strategies via Lattice Paths

Multi-Robot Adversarial Patrolling Strategies via Lattice Paths

Jan Buermann, Jie Zhang

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4213-4219. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/582

In full-knowledge multi-robot adversarial patrolling, a group of robots have to detect an adversary who knows the robots' strategy. The adversary can easily take advantage of any deterministic patrolling strategy, which necessitates the employment of a randomised strategy. While the Markov decision process has been the dominant methodology in computing the penetration detection probabilities, we apply enumerative combinatorics to characterise the penetration detection probabilities. It allows us to provide the closed formulae of these probabilities and facilitates characterising optimal random defence strategies. Comparing to iteratively updating the Markov transition matrices, our methods significantly reduces the time and space complexity of solving the problem. We use this method to tackle four penetration configurations.
Keywords:
Planning and Scheduling: Robot Planning
Planning and Scheduling: Planning under Uncertainty
Planning and Scheduling: Theoretical Foundations of Planning