Autonomous Agents Navigating in Virtual Road Network

In a virtual environment, agents must demonstrate some degree of realism and interactivity. This paper discusses the algorithm that enables agents to navigate a virtual road network realistically and interactively. The road description files written in this language provide the information of road environments to the navigating agents and the scene visualizer. We call this navigating agent in the road an ambient car. The ambient cars must follow the traffic rules as human does. To do this, the ambient car should continuously check its circumstances, such as, the traffic lights, lanes, road signs, and other ambient cars. Because of the huge scale of road network and the large number of ambient cars, the algorithm considers only the area where the participant is currently located. By this locality, the performance of the whole system does not fluctuate much in different situations. The behavior of ambient cars according to the predefined rules may appear monotonous. We added probability distribution functions to introduce some randomness. We implemented the above idea on silicon Graphics Indigo 2 workstation. The ambient car exhibited its awareness of lanes, traffic lights, and other cars. The participants could hardly distinguish between a human-controlled car and computer-controlled ambient car generated by the algorithm.