Character navigation in virtual environments is traditionally approached by first planning a path in the free portion of the environment and then employing steering behaviors that reactively adapt to constraints encountered during path following. Unfortunately a shortcoming of this approach is that the path planning stage does not take into account locomotion behavior choices and trade-offs during the path computation. We propose an approach for incorporating the behavioral capabilities of the character in the path planning stage. The produced paths address trade-offs related to path length and navigation behavior for handling narrow passages. The proposed behavioral path planner uses a combination of clearance-based path planning and character geometry collision detection with the 3D environment in order to achieve results suitable for interactive navigation in cluttered environments. The resulted paths address the natural behavior of preferring paths with enough clearance for regular walking when possible, while also considering shorter paths which need a combination of collision avoidance and lateral steps to be executed.
['Alain Juarez-Perez', 'Marcelo Kallmann']
Full-body behavioral path planning in cluttered environments