Geometric and Discrete Path Planning for Interactive Virtual Worlds

Marcelo Kallmann is Founding Faculty and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the School of Engineering of the University of California, Merced. He holds a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), was Research Faculty at the University of Southern California (USC), and a scientist at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) before moving to UC Merced in 2005. His areas of research include computer animation, virtual reality, and motion planning. At UC Merced, he established and leads the computer graphics research group. His research work has been supported by several awards from the US National Science Foundation, and his work on triangulations for path planning runs inside The Sims 4, the latest installment of one of the best-selling video game series of all time.Mubbasir Kapadia is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University. Previously, he was an Associate Research Scientist at Disney Research Zurich. He was a postdoctoral researcher and Assistant Director at the Center for Human Modeling and Simulation at University of Pennsylvania, under the directorship of Prof. Norman I. Badler. He was the project lead on the United States Army Research Laboratory (ARL) funded project Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance (RCTA). He received his Ph.D. in computer science at University of California, Los Angeles under the advisement of Professor Petros Faloutsos. He is the co-author of the book Virtual Crowds: Steps Toward Behavioral Realism, Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2015.

Preface.- Acknowledgments.- Basic Approaches for World Representation.- Discrete Search Algorithms.- Euclidean Shortest Paths.- Navigation Meshes and Geometric Structures with Clearance.- Extending Basic Search Techniques.- Constraint-Aware Navigation.- Anytime Dynamic Search on the GPU.- Dynamic Planning of Footstep Trajectories for Crowd Simulation.- Planning using Multiple Domains of Control.- Motion Planning for Character Motion Synthesis.- Epilogue.- Bibliography.- Authors' Biographies .