ConstraintBased Motion Planning for Multiple Agents Luv Kohli

Constraint-Based Motion Planning for Multiple Agents Luv Kohli COMP 259 March 5, 2003

Motion planning • What is it? • Basically, determine a path (e. g. , for a robot) from one point to another, avoiding obstacles along the way • Useful for many applications, including virtual assembly, automatic painting, etc.

Constraint-based? • Garber & Lin formulated the motion planning problem as a dynamical system simulation • Each robot is a rigid body or a collection of rigid bodies influenced by constraint forces in the environment

Constraints • Hard constraints – Absolutely must be satisfied (e. g. non -penetration, articulated robot joint connectivity) • Soft constraints – Encourage objects to follow certain behaviors (e. g. moving towards a goal, obstacle avoidance)

Multiple agents • I would like to extend the constraintbased framework to study scenarios involving multiple interacting agents • Possible scenarios: – Team rescue operations – compromised senses – Game scenarios (e. g. , sports) – Military operations – continuous line of sight

What’s this all for, anyway? • If the constraints of a real multipleagent system can be identified and modeled, then the feasibility of the goal can be studied • Virtual environments • Games

Tasks • Minimally I would like to get a constraint-based system working with multiple agents • The multiple agents will be acting either against each other or with one another towards some global goal, but influenced by local behavior

Other fun stuff • It might be interesting to add higher levels of behavior and intelligence • Flocking-style algorithms • Agents that learn skills that can be applied to multiple scenarios

References • Garber, M. and Lin, M. Constraint-Based Motion Planning using Voronoi Diagrams. Proc. Fifth International Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), 2002. • Garber, M. and Lin, M. Constraint-Based Motion Planning for Virtual Prototyping. Proc. ACM Symposium on Solid Modeling and Applications, 2002. • Reynolds, C. W. . Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model. Computer Graphics, 21(4): 25 -34, 1987. • Goldenstein, S. , Large, E. , and Metaxas, D. Dynamic Autonomous Agents: Game Applications. Computer Animation, 1998.