Skip to main content
European Commission logo print header

Motion Planning in Virtual Environments

Objective

Motion planning, also termed path planning, plays an increasingly important role in virtual environment applications. Multiple autonomous entities must navigate through virtual worlds and need to plan their own routes and motions. The goal of this project is to develop motion-planning techniques that are suitable for these applications.

The developed techniques will need to have real-time performance and deal with:
(1) large, complex environments;
(2) dynamic changes in the environment;
(3) the complicated kinematic structure of some of the entities;
(4) simultaneous planning for multiple moving entities and;
(5) path quality and natural constraints on the allowed motions. Motion planning, also termed path planning, plays an increasingly important role in virtual environment applications. Multiple autonomous entities must navigate through virtual worlds and need to plan their own routes and motions. The goal of this project is to develop motion-planning techniques that are suitable for these applications.

The developed techniques will need to have real-time performance and deal with:
(1) large, complex environments;
(2) dynamic changes in the environment;
(3) the complicated kinematic structure of some of the entities;
(4) simultaneous planning for multiple moving entities and;
(5) path quality and natural constraints on the allowed motions.

OBJECTIVES
The overall objective of this project is to develop motion planning techniques that can compute in real time visually-convincing motions for multiple autonomous entities that navigate through complex virtual worlds. To this end we will develop new motion planning algorithms that:
(1) after pre-processing have real-time performance;
(2) can deal with dynamic changes in the environment;
(3) can plan simultaneous motions of multiple entities;
(4) can plan motions for highly-articulated bodies. The algorithms are integrated in a demonstrator and evaluated on realistic scenarios.

DESCRIPTION OF WORK
Motion planning, also termed path planning, plays an increasingly important role in virtual environment applications. Multiple autonomous entities must navigate through virtual worlds and need to plan their own routes and motions. The goal of this project is to develop new motion planning techniques that are suitable for these applications. Although current motion-planning techniques are capable of planning motions in complex environments, the applications in virtual environments are much more demanding and new algorithms need to be developed to deal with these. In particular, after pre-processing, real-time performance is required, while the environments are large and often dynamic. The techniques must be robust in the sense that they capture the possible motions well. Also, the resulting motions must look natural and be short. We will develop new, improved planning approaches to reach these objectives. Secondly, multiple entities must often navigate through the same environment and entities have a complex kinematic structure. External navigational motion must be combined with internal articulated motion in a natural way. To solve such problems we plan to use a combination of motion planning, computational geometry, and combinatorial algorithms. The algorithms will be integrated in a demonstrator, which will be evaluated on realistic scenarios through our industrial contacts. When the project is successful, the resulting techniques will become applicable in computer games, safety training applications, walkthroughs for architectural design and urban planning, training and planning for surgical procedures, and the design and maintenance of installations using CAD systems, to name a few.

Call for proposal

Data not available

Coordinator

UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT
EU contribution
No data
Address
HEIDELBERGLAAN 8
3584 CS UTRECHT
Netherlands

See on map

Total cost
No data

Participants (3)