Reciprocal Velocity Obstacles for Real-Time Multi-Agent Navigation

2:00pm, Jan 27, Tuesday, 2009, ST2, 430 (Notice the time change)

Speaker

Jur van den Berg
Postdoctoral Researcher
Department of Computer Science
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Abstract

We propose a new concept ---the "Reciprocal Velocity Obstacle"--- for real-time multi-agent navigation. We consider the case in which each agent navigates independently without explicit communication with other agents. Our formulation is an extension of the Velocity Obstacle concept, which was introduced for navigation among (passively) moving obstacles. Our approach takes into account the reactive behavior of the other agents by implicitly assuming that the other agents make a similar collision-avoidance reasoning. We show that this method guarantees safe and oscillation-free motions for each of the agents. We apply our concept to navigation of thousands of agents in densely populated environments containing both static and moving obstacles, and we show that real-time and scalable performance is achieved in such challenging scenarios.

Short Bio

MSc: University of Groningen, The Netherlands
PhD: University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. Advisor: prof. Mark Overmars
currently: Postdoctoral Researcher at University of North Carolina with profs. Dinesh Manocha and Ming Lin
next year: Postdoctoral Researcher at UC Berkeley with prof. Ken Goldberg