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.