Inverse Steering Behaviors May 20
I was excited to find one of my approaches being used in a commercial product for emergency egress simulation, sold by a company in the US: Back in 2006, Heni, Jan and I published an approach we called Inverse Steering Behaviors in the chapter “Fast, Neat, and Under Control: Arbitrating Between Steering Behaviors” of AI Game Programming Wisdom 3. The technique builds on Steering Behaviors by Craig Reynolds – reactive procedures for physical agents (like robots or simulated creatures) to move in a lifelike way within dynamic environments. Developed in the late 80s, steering behaviors found applications for example in movies like Lord of the Rings. Our Inverse Steering Behaviors improve the arbitration between individual behaviors, which results in less collisions. Back when we did the work, we used the approach in our robotic soccer team for navigation and to dribble around opponents. The agent-based emergency evacuation simulation system sold by Thunderhead Engineering, is called Pathfinder.
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