Embodiments of the invention 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 of the invention 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 of the
invention 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.
