Emotional Reciprocal Velocity Obstacles for Leader-Following: A Velocity Obstacles-Based Steering Behavior

The steering behavior of autonomous agents in animation and games aims to form agent movement to navigate around a virtual world. Leader-following behavior is a steering behavior formed by followers who must follow their leader while the leader guides the group to their destination. Followers need to deter themself from crowding their leader as it will interfere with their leader’s navigation, but at the same time, they want to remain close to the leader to avoid missing their way. These followers’ actions may hinder the leader’s movement thus creating a disturbance. This study propose a new design for leader-following behavior. We employ Emotional Reciprocal Velocity Obstacles (ERVO) to handle the multi-agent navigation in a leader-following manner. Our method lies in applying the ERVO model to embed the necessity for the follower to follow their leader with stress safety direction that lies at a certain distance to their respective leader. We also conducted a series of experiments to compare our method with several other leader-following methods. The experiment with up to 100 agents shows that our method produced less interaction overhead by 0.753 seconds with 18.81% less collision compared with other leader-following method.