Contents  Introduction  What is a  potential field?  Forward... march!  Filling local  minima  It is better  to prevent...  Get away from  the edges  Printable version

Introduction

First of all, I'm no authority on pathfinding or motion planning. There just seems to be a lot of interest in pathfinding algorithms on the artificial intelligence message board. Last year I did a big project on motion planning for a university course, but since almost nobody on the net understands Dutch, I thought it might be best to translate it and let a much broader public get acquainted with the general concepts of motion planning. In this article I'll shed some light on several techniques using potential fields. We'll focus on the theoretical part of the algorithms and now and then I'll throw in some screenshots from a demo-application I made for the project.

Should you have more questions or ideas on the subject, my name is Stefan Baert, I live in Belgium and on the net you'll mostly find me as 'StrategicAlliance'.

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