Eva Schiffer

Steering Behaviors for Autonomous Characters. Craig Reynolds.

Summary:

This paper discusses different behaviors that independent agents can make use of when choosing a path through a virtual environment.

Problem:

Beyond basic flocking, what sorts of behaviors can allow independent agents to simulate interesting behavior found in nature?

Method:

This paper goes over several behavior patterns that independent agents can use to simulate more complex behaviors than simple flocking. The paper also presents a simple model for vehicular motion and a very thorough discussion of related works.

Key Ideas:

There are many more complex behaviors that flocking agents can take into account when making movement decisions. 

Contributions:

Behaviors discussed in this paper include: seek, flee, pursuit, evasion, offset pursuit, arrival, obstacle avoidance, wander, path following, wall following, containment, flow field following, unaligned collision avoidance, and leader following, as well as the traditional cohesion, separation, and alignment.
I read this paper primarily because I was interested in the seek/flee and pursuit/evasion behaviors for purposes of incorporating them into my application. I felt that this was a very good overview of relatively simple behaviors that can be incorporated into independent agent simulations.

Questions:

I did not have any significant questions about this paper.