Swarming Behavior Using Probabilistic Roadmap Techniques

While techniques exist for simulating swarming behaviors, these methods usually provide only simplistic navigation and planning capabilities. In this review, we explore the benefits of integrating roadmap-based path planning methods with flocking techniques to achieve different behaviors. We show how group behaviors such as exploring can be facilitated by using dynamic roadmaps (e.g., modifying edge weights) as an implicit means of communication between flock members. Extending ideas from cognitive modeling, we embed behavior rules in individual flock members and in the roadmap. These behavior rules enable the flock members to modify their actions based on their current location and state. We propose new techniques for several distinct group behaviors: homing, exploring (covering and goal searching), passing through narrow areas and shepherding. We present results that show that our methods provide significant improvement over methods that utilize purely local knowledge and moreover, that we achieve performance approaching that which could be obtained by an ideal method that has complete global knowledge. Animations of these behaviors can be viewed on our webpages.