Assume that inside an initial planar area there are smart mobile evaders attempting to avoid detection by a team of sweeping searching agents. All sweepers detect evaders with fan-shaped sensors, modeling the field of view of real cameras. Detection of all evaders is guaranteed with cooperative sweeping strategies, by setting requirements on sweepers' speed, and by carefully designing their trajectories. Assume the smart evaders have an upper limit on their speed which is a-priori known to the sweeping team. An easier task for the team of sweepers is to confine evaders to the domain in which they are initially located. The sweepers accomplish the confinement task if they move sufficiently fast and detect evaders by applying an appropriate search strategy. Any given search strategy results in a minimal sweeper's speed in order to be able to detect all evaders. The minimal speed guarantees the ability of the sweeping team to confine evaders to their original domain, and if the sweepers move faster they are able to detect all evaders that are present in the region. We present results on the total search time for a novel pincer-movement based search protocol that utilizes complementary trajectories along with adaptive sensor geometries for any even number of pursuers.

Suppose that in a given planar circular region, there are some smart mobile evaders and we would like to find them using sweeping agents. We assume that the sweeping agents are in a line formation whose total length is 2r. We propose procedures for designing a sweeping process that ensures the successful completion of the task, thereby deriving conditions on the sweeping velocity of the linear formation and its path. Successful completion of the task means that evaders with a given limit on their velocity cannot escape the sweeping agents. A simpler task for the sweeping formation is the confinement of the evaders to their initial domain. The feasibility of completing these tasks depends on geometric and dynamic constraints that impose a lower bound on the velocity that the sweeper line formation must have. This critical velocity is derived to ensure the satisfaction of the confinement task. Increasing the velocity above the lower bound enables the agents to complete the search task as well. We present results on the total search time as a function of the sweeping velocity of the formation given the initial conditions on the size of the search region and the maximal velocity of the evaders.