Defending a Static Target Point with a Slow Defender

This paper studies a target-defense game played between a slow defender and a fast attacker. The attacker wins the game if it reaches the target while avoiding the defender's capture disk. The defender wins the game by preventing the attacker from reaching the target, which includes reaching the target and containing it in the capture disk. Depending on the initial condition, the attacker must circumnavigate the defender's capture disk, resulting in a constrained trajectory. This condition produces three phases of the game, which we analyze to solve for the game of kind. We provide the barrier surface that divides the state space into attacker-win and defender win regions, and present the corresponding strategies that guarantee win for each region. Numerical experiments demonstrate the theoretical results as well as the efficacy of the proposed strategies.