Fusing terrain and goals: agent control in urban environments

Varol Kaptan; Erol Gelenbe

doi:10.1117/12.666720

18 April 2006 Fusing terrain and goals: agent control in urban environments

Varol Kaptan, Erol Gelenbe

Proceedings Volume 6242, Multisensor, Multisource Information Fusion: Architectures, Algorithms, and Applications 2006; 624208 (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.666720
Event: Defense and Security Symposium, 2006, Orlando (Kissimmee), Florida, United States

Abstract

The changing face of contemporary military conflicts has forced a major shift of focus in tactical planning and evaluation from the classical Cold War battlefield to an asymmetric guerrilla-type warfare in densely populated urban areas. The new arena of conflict presents unique operational difficulties due to factors like complex mobility restrictions and the necessity to preserve civilian lives and infrastructure. In this paper we present a novel method for autonomous agent control in an urban environment. Our approach is based on fusing terrain information and agent goals for the purpose of transforming the problem of navigation in a complex environment with many obstacles into the easier problem of navigation in a virtual obstacle-free space. The main advantage of our approach is its ability to act as an adapter layer for a number of efficient agent control techniques which normally show poor performance when applied to an environment with many complex obstacles. Because of the very low computational and space complexity at runtime, our method is also particularly well suited for simulation or control of a huge number of agents (military as well as civilian) in a complex urban environment where traditional path-planning may be too expensive or where a just-in-time decision with hard real-time constraints is required.

Citation Download Citation

Varol Kaptan and Erol Gelenbe "Fusing terrain and goals: agent control in urban environments", Proc. SPIE 6242, Multisensor, Multisource Information Fusion: Architectures, Algorithms, and Applications 2006, 624208 (18 April 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.666720

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