Watch Out! A Framework for Evaluating Steering Behaviors

Interactive virtual worlds feature dynamic characters that must navigate through a variety of landscapes populated with various obstacles and other agents. The process of navigating to a desired location within a dynamic environment is the problem of steering. While there are many approaches to steering, to our knowledge there is no standard way of evaluating and comparing the quality of such solutions. To address this, we propose a diverse set of benchmarks and a flexible method of evaluation that can be used to compare different steering algorithms. We discuss the challenges and criteria for objectively evaluating steering behaviors and describe the metrics and scoring method used in our benchmark evaluation. We hope that, with constructive feedback from the community, our framework will eventually evolve into a standard and comprehensive approach to debug, compare and provide an overall assessment of the effectiveness of steering algorithms.