Collision-free object movement using vector fields

The topics of computer animation and object collision detection and resolution have become increasingly desirable in a wide range of applications including autonomous vehicle navigation, robotics, and the movie industry. However, the techniques currently available are typically difficult to use or are restricted to a particular domain. This paper presents a technique for providing automatic animation and collision avoidance of arbitrary objects in a computer graphics system. The underlying construct used in this process is a surrounding volume octree vector field. The system automatically generates these structures around objects in the scene. By judicious creation and use of these vector fields, objects in the scene move and interact, but do not collide. The manner in which these vector fields are created is given. Two applications cloud movement over terrain and autonomous aircraft navigation are presented which show typical usage of this technique.