An Extendable Multiagent Model for Behavioural Animation

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for visually simulating the behaviour of actors in virtual environments. In principle, the environmental interaction follows a cyclic processing of perception, decision, and action. As natural life-forms perceive their environment by active sensing, our approach also tends to let the artificial actor actively sense the virtual world. This allows us to place the characters in non-preprocessed virtual dynamic environments, what we call generic environments. A main aspect within our framework is the strict distinction between a behaviour pattern, that we term model, and its instances, named characters, which use the pattern. This allows them sharing one or more behaviour models. Low-level tasks like sensing or acting are took over by so called subagents, which are subordinated modules extendedly plugged in the character. In a demonstration we exemplarily show the application of our framework. We place the same character in different environments and let it climb and descend stairs, ramps and hills autonomously. Additionally the reactiveness for moving objects is tested. In future, this approach shall go into action for a simulation of an urban environment.