Maintaining team coherence under the velocity obstacle framework
Andrew S. Kimmel, Andrew Dobson, Kostas E. Bekris · 2012
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.