A RIM Seminar will be held on Wednesday June 18 given by Jur van den Berg and the topic will be multi-agent navigation. The seminar will take place in TSRB (85 5th Street) in the GVU Cafe (2nd Floor).

Reciprocal Velocity Obstacles for Real-Time Multi-Agent Navigation

Jur van den Berg
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
University of Utrecht

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.