Visibility Optimization for Surveillance-Evasion Games

Abstract: We consider surveillance-evasion differential games, where a pursuer must try to constantly maintain visibility of a moving evader. The pursuer loses as soon as the evader becomes occluded. Optimal controls for game can be formulated as a Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaac equation. We use an upwind scheme to compute the feedback value function, corresponding to the end-game time of the differential game. Although the value function enables optimal controls, it is prohibitively expensive to compute, even for a single pursuer and single evader on a small grid. We consider a discrete variant of the surveillance-game. We propose two locally optimal strategies based on the static value function for the surveillance-evasion game with multiple pursuers and evaders. We show that Monte Carlo tree search and self-play reinforcement learning can train a deep neural network to generate reasonable strategies for on-line game play. Given enough computational resources and offline training time, the proposed model can continue to improve its policies and efficiently scale to higher resolutions.