Interactive navigation of multiple agents in crowded environments

Abstract

We present a novel approach for interactive navigation and planning of multiple agents in crowded scenes with moving obstacles. Our formulation uses a precomputed roadmap that provides macroscopic, global connectivity for wayfinding and combines it with fast and localized navigation for each agent. At runtime, each agent senses the environment independently and computes a collision-free path based on an extended "Velocity Obstacles" concept. Furthermore, our algorithm ensures that each agent exhibits no oscillatory behaviors. We have tested the performance of our algorithm in several challenging scenarios with a high density of virtual agents. In practice, the algorithm performance scales almost linearly with the number of agents and can run at interactive rates on multi-core processors.