Steering behaviors for autonomous vehicles in virtual environments

This paper presents steering behaviors that control autonomous vehicles populating roadways in virtual urban environments. Behavior programming is facilitated by a set of representations of the environment that use convenient frames of reference in natural coordinate systems. Roadway surfaces are modeled as three-dimensional ribbons that make the local orientation of the road explicit and allow relative distances on the road to be simply computed. Roads and intersections are connected to form a ribbon network. An egocentric representation called a path melds road and intersection segments into a single, continuous ribbon that captures the vehicle's short-term plan of navigation. A topological structure called a route supports wayfinding. We describe how the interrelated ribbon, path, and route representations are used to build multi-component behaviors that plan routes and safely navigate through traffic filled road networks - tracking lanes, shifting lanes to avoid congestion, anticipating lane changes needed to make turns dictated by the route, negotiating intersections, and respecting the rules of the road.