Quartz: an autonomous navigation system for MOUT simulations

Autonomous navigation systems are important to Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) simulations for generating realistic tactical behaviours for the non-player characters (or bots). In this paper, we describe our work on Quartz, an autonomous navigation system for MOUT simulations. Novel features of Quartz include qualitative spatial representation and hierarchical spatial reasoning which enables fast situation analysis and human-like path planning in a dynamic environment. To assess the effectiveness of Quartz, we have integrated it into Twilight City, a virtual environment for MOUT simulations. Experimental results show that Quartz is very effective for quick tactical path generation in dynamic MOUT environments. Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.