Geometric and Discrete Path Planning for Interactive Virtual Worlds (Synthesis Lectures on Visual Computing: Computer Graphics, Animation, Computational Photography and Imaging)

Path planning and navigation are indispensable components for controlling autonomous agents in interactive virtual worlds. Given the growing demands on the size and complexity of modern virtual worlds, a number of new techniques have been developed for achieving intelligent navigation for the next generation of interactive multi-agent simulations. This book reviews the evolution of several related techniques, starting from classical planning and computational geometry techniques and then gradually moving toward more advanced topics with focus on recent developments from the work of the authors. The covered topics range from discrete search and geometric representations to planning under different types of constraints and harnessing the power of graphics hardware in order to address Euclidean shortest paths and discrete search for multiple agents under limited time budgets. The use of planning algorithms beyond path planning is also discussed in the areas of crowd animation and whole-body motion planning for virtual characters.

Marcelo Kallmann is Founding Faculty and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the School of Engineering of the University of California, Merced. He holds a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), was Research Faculty at the University of Southern California (USC), and a scientist at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) before moving to UC Merced in 2005. His areas of research include computer animation, virtual reality, and motion planning. At UC Merced, he established and leads the computer graphics research group. His research work has been supported by several awards from the US National Science Foundation, and his work on triangulations for path planning runs inside The Sims 4, the latest installment of one of the best-selling video game series of all time.Mubbasir Kapadia is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University. Previously, he was an Associate Research Scientist at Disney Research Zurich. He was a postdoctoral researcher and Assistant Director at the Center for Human Modeling and Simulation at University of Pennsylvania, under the directorship of Prof. Norman I. Badler. He was the project lead on the United States Army Research Laboratory (ARL) funded project Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance (RCTA). He received his Ph.D. in computer science at University of California, Los Angeles under the advisement of Professor Petros Faloutsos. He is the co-author of the book Virtual Crowds: Steps Toward Behavioral Realism, Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2015.