Embodiments provide a strategy for computing the motions of a mobile
robot operating in an obstacle-laden environment without requiring prior knowledge
of the distribution of obstacles in the environment or knowing the trajectory of
a target tracked by the robot. Embodiments provide an algorithm that governs the
motion of the observer robot based on measurements of the target's position and
the location of obstacles in the environment. The algorithm computes a description
of the geometric arrangement between the target and the observer's visibility region
produced by the obstacles and computes a continuous control rule using this description.
Embodiments employ an escape-path tree data structure to categorize the target's
possible modes of escaping from the observer robot's sensors and use the escape-path
tree to determine the target's shortest escape path.
