Living organisms have developed and optimized ingenious defense strategies based on positional entropy. One of the most significant examples in this respect is known as protean behavior, where a prey animal under threat performs unpredictable zig-zag movements in order to confuse, delay or escape the predator. This kind of defensive behavior can inspire efficient strategies for patrolling robots evolving in the presence of adversaries. The main goal of our proposed bioinspired method is to implement the protean behavior by altering the reference path of the robot with sudden and erratic direction changes without endangering the robot's overall mission. By this, a foe intending to target and destroy the mobile robot from a distance has less time for acquiring and retaining the proper sight alignment. The method uses the chaotic dynamics of the 2D Arnold's cat map as a primary source of positional entropy and transfers this feature to every reference path segment using the kinematic relative motion concept. The effectiveness of this novel biologically inspired method is validated through extensive and realistic simulation case studies.
Keywords: Arnold’s cat map; adversarial patrolling; chaotic dynamics; mobile robot; positional entropy; protean behavior.