Group Agent-based Steering for the Realistic Corner Turning and Group Movement of Pedestrians in a Crowd Simulation

Crowd simulation realism has progressed a great deal in the past decade; however, much of this progress only deals with the movement of individuals rather than group movement. We propose group agent-based steering as an alternative to assigning a member of the group as the leader for which other members must follow. Our new scheme keeps pedestrians moving around essentially shoulder to shoulder in a small group as in real life, leaving it up to the individual members for performing collision avoidance while keeping up with the group as a whole. We show how this scheme can be useful also for coherent corner turning. Furthermore, we also propose a way to handle traffic congestion by groups of agents corner turning through the use of group agent path decision making with the help of triggers. Experiments show that congestion is reduced and collision avoidance handling is simplified because there is more room for maneuvering.