Formation preserving navigation of agent teams in 3-D terrains

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Bilgisayar Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2008

Öğrenci: ALİ GALİP BAYRAK

Danışman: FARUK POLAT

Özet:

Navigation of a group of autonomous agents that are needed to maintain a formation is a challenging task which has not been studied much in especially 3-D terrains. This thesis presents a novel approach to collision free path finding of multiple agents preserving a predefined formation in a 3-D terrain. The proposed method could be used in many areas like navigation of semi-automated forces (SAF) at unit level in military simulations and non player characters (NPC) in computer games. The proposed path finding algorithm first computes an optimal path from an initial point to a target point after analyzing the 3-D terrain data from which it constructs a weighted graph. Then, it employs a real-time path finding algorithm specifically designed to realize the navigation of the group from one way point to the successive one on the optimal path generated at the previous stage, preserving the formation and avoiding collision both. A software was developed to test the methods discussed here.