Waypoint Graph Based Fast Pathfinding in Dynamic Environment

Abstract

Pathfinding is a fundamental task in many applications including robotics, computer games, and vehicle navigation. Waypoint graph is often used for pathfinding due to its advantage in specifying the space and obstacles in a region. Currently the waypoint graph based pathfinding suffers from large computation overhead and hence long latency in dynamic environment, where the location of obstacles may change. In this paper, we propose a fast approach for waypoint graph based pathfinding in such scenario. We eliminate unnecessary waypoints and edges to make the graph sparse. And then we design a prediction-based local method to handle the dynamic change in the environment. Extensive simulation has been done and the results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing approaches.

A Virtual Reality Simulation Method for Crowd Evacuation in a Multiexit Indoor Fire Environment

“…Qing et al [16] divided buildings into dense grids to plan evacuation paths, but the computational cost was too high to display the real-time visual simulation process. To overcome the shortcomings of the grid, the node expression of the waypoint [17,18] was proposed, making it possible to add nodes freely in the scene and to connect all nodes to build a traffic network. Although many calculations can be reduced, the location of the waypoint needs to be designed.…”