ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a base recipe to implement a group navigation system. It describes an introduction, presenting the different kinds of group navigation and the basics of navigation behaviors. Flocking strategies for navigation can be applied for other animal species as well as humans. The chapter introduces a way to efficiently include the group navigation process into a software architecture. One of the reasons to introduce group navigation is to factorize a costly aspect of navigation: pathfinding. In most modern navigation engines, the simulated entities are autonomous, with their behavior relying on local “perception” to take action, not on an external choreographer. With this approach in mind, it is possible to design decentralized navigation behaviors to comply with group constraints. In real life, groups tend to stay coherent when navigating between obstacles and among other pedestrians, which is why it is interesting to use group-level collision avoidance.
