A Path-Planning Method for Human-Tracking Agents Based on Long-Term Prediction

This paper deals with a multiagent path-planning problem where several robots track humans to obtain detailed information on human behaviors and characteristics. For this, agents´ paths are planned on the basis of the similarity between the predicted positions of humans and the agents´ field of view. The long-horizon path planned on the basis of an accurate long-horizon prediction improves the tracking performance. However, it requires heavy computation and is less useful if the prediction is inaccurate. Since the accuracy of the prediction depends on the situation, the prediction term is determined by the similarity between the current and previous predictions. The results of computer simulation showed that our path-planning method works well for trajectories of humans in a dynamic environment by changing the horizon length of the path planning.