Better Group Behaviors in Complex Environments using Global Roadmaps

While many methods to simulate flocking behaviors have been proposed, these techniques usually only provide simplistic navigation and planning capabilities because each flock member’s behavior depends only on its local environment. In this work, we investigate how the addition of global information in the form of a roadmap of the environment enables more sophisticated flocking behaviors and supports global navigation and planning. In this paper, we propose new techniques for four distinct group behaviors: homing, goal searching, traversing narrow areas and shepherding. Extending ideas from cognitive modeling, we embed behavior rules in individual flock members and in the roadmap. These embedded behaviors enable the creatures to modify their actions based on their current location and state. For example, the flock might move as an unordered group in open regions and in a follow-the-leader fashion through narrow passages. These behaviors exploit global knowledge of the environment and utilize information gathered by all flock members which is communicated by allowing individual flock members to dynamically update the shared roadmap to reflect (un)desirable routes or regions. We present experimental results showing how the judicious use of simple roadmaps of the environment enables complex behaviors to be obtained at minimal cost. Animations can be viewed at http://parasol.tamu.edu.