onsdag 23 mars 2016

Group formations prototype #1

Today we have experimented with some group formations. We have implemented an abstract base class for making the agents align in a specific formation. To use this class one has to inherit it and implement the method CreateTemplate(). In this method there needs to be specified how the relative positions to the leader of the group are placed. Also, the nr of agents has to be stated in the inspector and which of the agents is the leader.

Here is a demo of a group formation for walking on a line:


Here is a demo of a group walking in a triangle formation:



torsdag 17 mars 2016

Agents avoiding collision



In this scene we have made different approaches to making the agents avoid each other. First we tried using the UnitySteer script "Steer For Spherical Obstacles" on one of the agents. This script was not supposed to be used in that way, we found out. Then we tried with the script "Steer For Evasion". This script uses another agent as the reference to avoid. The disadvantage with that is that the agent can only avoid one other object for each script. 

The hard part in the simulation was to find out which parameter to change in order to avoid collisions between the agents. We needed to find the radius parameter for which represented the agents "comfort zone". In the end we found this to be a combination of the "Safety Distance" and the vehicles radius. The result is shown in the video above. In the video above ther's a slight offset in the vertical axis between the two agents.



If there's no offset the agents will do the same movements for a while and then diverge from each other. This is something that can happen in the real world too, but maybe not this extreme.

Collision avoidance with Unitysteer

Today we experimented with different types of collision avoidance for our agent. The following scene in these videos is composed of one agent and one obstacle. The agent will collide straight on the obstacle, without any angle of incidence. The agent's goal is to pass the obstacle and end up on the other side.

In this scene we used Unitysteer's biped ve script for our agent. By using this our agent got stuck and didn't make any progress.



Our nex step was to try Unitysteer's Autonomous Vehicle scrip with the same scene setup as above. When we tried this the agent managed to avoid the obstacle and steer around it.