Maintaining team coherence under the velocity obstacle framework

Andrew Kimmel, Andrew Dobson, Kostas Bekris

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

10 Scopus citations

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 languageAmerican English
Pages73-80
Number of pages8
StatePublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
Event11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems 2012: Innovative Applications Track, AAMAS 2012 - Valencia, Spain
Duration: Jun 4 2012Jun 8 2012

Other

Other11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems 2012: Innovative Applications Track, AAMAS 2012
Country/TerritorySpain
CityValencia
Period6/4/126/8/12

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence

Keywords

  • AAMAS proceedings
  • Collision avoidance
  • Communication constraints
  • Multi-agent
  • Team coherence

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Maintaining team coherence under the velocity obstacle framework'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this