Abstract
Many multi-agent applications may involve a notion of spatial coherence. For instance, simulations of virtual agents often need to model a coherent group or crowd. Alternatively, robots may prefer to stay within a pre-specified communication range. This paper proposes an extension of a decentralized, reactive collision avoidance framework, which defines obstacles in the velocity space, known as Velocity Obstacles (VOs), for coherent groups of agents. The extension, referred to in this work as a Loss of Communication Obstacle (LOCO), aims to maintain proximity among agents by imposing constraints in the velocity space and restricting the set of feasible controls. If the introduction of LOCOs results in a problem that is too restrictive, then the proximity constraints are relaxed in order to maintain collision avoidance. If agents break their proximity constraints, a method is applied to reconnect them. The approach is fast and integrates nicely with the Velocity Obstacle framework. It yields improved coherence for groups of robots connected through an input constraint graph that are moving with constant velocity. Simulated environments involving a single team moving among static obstacles, as well as multiple teams operating in the same environment, are considered in the experiments and evaluated for collisions, computational cost and proximity constraint maintenance. The experiments show that improved coherence is achieved while maintaining collision avoidance, at a small computational cost and path quality degradation.
Original language | American English |
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Pages | 73-80 |
Number of pages | 8 |
State | Published - 2012 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems 2012: Innovative Applications Track, AAMAS 2012 - Valencia, Spain Duration: Jun 4 2012 → Jun 8 2012 |
Other
Other | 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems 2012: Innovative Applications Track, AAMAS 2012 |
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Country/Territory | Spain |
City | Valencia |
Period | 6/4/12 → 6/8/12 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Artificial Intelligence
Keywords
- AAMAS proceedings
- Collision avoidance
- Communication constraints
- Multi-agent
- Team coherence