Motion planning for coherent groups of entities

Motion planning for multiple entities is a challenging problem in today´s virtual environments. In this paper we develop an innovative approach to motion planning for groups of entities, where coherence is taken into account. We model the group by a deformable shape. Next, we use the Probabilistic Roadmap Method to plan the (global) motion of the shape. For this, we, develop new sampling techniques and local planners. A new approach, called Group Potential Fields, is also introduced as a means to determine the local motions of the entities inside the deformable shape. Global and local motions are then combined to find the required paths for the entities. Experiments show that the approach is able to find paths for groups of varying sizes, after limited preprocessing time, where the groups stay coherent.