Abstract
We present our ongoing development of a virtual Middle Eastern marketplace to serve as a testbed for military training simulations, and human soldier-robot team experiments. We build upon the ADAPT platform for simulating and animating a virtual populace, and introduce heterogeneity in visual appearance and behavior by procedurally generating virtual human models, and authoring complex, multi-actor behaviors using Parameterized Behavior Trees (PBTs). We author an interactive simulation where villagers roam the marketplace, converse with each other, and haggle with vendors to purchase different goods. The presence of the soldier-robot team elicits appropriate responses in the villagers who either express caution or curiosity by keeping a safe distance, or waving to passing soldiers. Our goals are to design and implement a robust and flexible simulation architecture with an activity authoring system for building complex inhabited interactive virtual environments. The presence of an interactive virtual populace adds to the immersion and provides a potentially richer training experience for subjects. Event trees, involving multiple actors in specific roles, enable mission directors to author complex missions requiring a deeper engagement of the populace by defining events which are triggered based on spatial and temporal conditions, or user input. We demonstrate our framework by authoring and simulating a variety of missions including cordon and search, object retrieval, crowd dispersal, and evacuation in a Middle Eastern marketplace environment.
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Supplementary Document
Mubbasir Kapadia, Alexander Shoulson, Justin Cockburn, Yonas Solomon, Corey Novich, Zia Zhu, Himanshu Masand, and Norman I. BadlerSubmitted to Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2013
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