Pathfinding in Games

Commercial games can be an excellent testbed to artificial intelligence (AI) research, being a middle ground between synthetic, highly abstracted academic benchmarks, and more intricate problems from real life. Among the many AI techniques and problems relevant to games, such as learning, planning, and natural language processing, pathfinding stands out as one of the most common applications of AI research to games. In this document we survey recent work in pathfinding in games. Then we identify some challenges and potential directions for future work. This chapter summarizes the discussions held in the pathfinding workgroup

Study and Development of Hierarchical Path Finding to Speed Up Crowd Simulation

We propose a new hierarchical path finding solution for large environments. We use a navigation mesh as abstract data structure to partition the 3D world. Then, we build a hierarchy of graphs that allow us to perform faster path finding calculations than a common A*

Task Allocation in Foraging Robot Swarms:The Role of Information Sharing

Autonomous task allocation is a desirable feature of robot swarms that collect and deliver items in scenarios where congestion, caused by accumulated items or robots, can temporarily interfere with swarm behaviour. In such settings, self-regulation of workforce can prevent unnecessary energy consumption. We explore two types of self-regulation: non-social, where robots become idle upon experiencing congestion, and social, where robots broadcast information about congestion to their team mates in order to socially inhibit foraging. We show that while both types of self-regulation can lead to improved energy efficiency and increase the amount of resource collected, the speed with which information about congestion flows through a swarm affects the scalability of these algorithms