Target Prediction Under Deceptive Switching Strategies via Outlier-Robust Filtering of Partially Observed Incomplete Trajectories

Abstract: Motivated by a study on deception and counter-deception, this paper addresses the problem of identifying an agent's target as it seeks to reach one of two targets in a given environment. In practice, an agent may initially follow a strategy to aim at one target but decide to switch to another midway. Such a strategy can be deceptive when the counterpart only has access to imperfect observations, which include heavily corrupted sensor noise and possible outliers, making it difficult to visually identify the agent's true intent. To counter deception and identify the true target, we utilize prior knowledge of the agent's dynamics and the imprecisely observed partial trajectory of the agent's states to dynamically update the estimation of the posterior probability of whether a deceptive switch has taken place. However, existing methods in the literature have not achieved effective deception identification within a reasonable computation time. We propose a set of outlier-robust change detection methods to track relevant change-related statistics efficiently, enabling the detection of deceptive strategies in hidden nonlinear dynamics with reasonable computational effort. The performance of the proposed framework is examined for Weapon-Target Assignment (WTA) detection under deceptive strategies using random simulations in the kinematics model with external forcing.