Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 3, numbers 3 and 4, 2010 // View article

Motion Planning of Autonomous Agents Situated in Informed Virtual Geographic Environments

Authors:
Mehdi Mekni

Keywords: Virtual Geographic Environment (IVGE); Hierarchical Path Planning (HPP); Navigation and Collision Avoidance

Abstract:
Multi-Agent Geo-Simulation (MAGS) aims to simulate phenomena involving a large number of autonomous situated actors (implemented as software agents) evolving and interacting within a Virtual representation of the Geographic Environment (VGE). Motion planning is a critical issue since it corresponds to one of the most important activities of agents moving in a complex and large-scale VGE. There is also a need for an accurate representation of the environment in order to support efficient path planning computation as well as reactive navigation for the detection and avoidance of obstacles and other agents. In this paper, we propose a semantically informed and geometrically precise virtual geographic environment method which allows to use Geographic Information System (GIS) data to automatically build an informed graph structure called Informed Virtual Geographic Environmnt (IVGE). Furthermore, we propose a topologic abstraction algorithm which builds a Hierarchical Topologic Graph (HTG) describing the IVGE and a Hierarchical Path Planning (HPP) algorithm which uses this graph. In addition, we propose a graph-based neighborhood structure in order to support motion planning of autonomous agents taking into account the characteristics of the IVGE.

Pages: 226 to 237

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2010. Used with permission.

Publication date: April 6, 2011

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2679