Multi-agent approach and emergence of a virtual human behaviour in a VR environment

Nowadays, time to market is becoming shorter and shorter, physical mock up is being more and more often replaced by digital mock up. However, physical mock up was very useful up until today to check accessibility and maintainability for example. So, it is now important to have tools to simulate with digital mock up what physical mock up used to be used for. For example, to check accessibility, a tool that allows the simulation of the manipulation of an object by a human being in a cluttered environment without collision is needed. We propose a new way to create human behaviour of a manikin by the way of a multi-agent approach. Our system is based on a former architecture already presented. It consists of a collision-free path planning system using a co-operation between software and human operator abilities. The architecture for this cooperation is based on a multi-level tree architecture, which enables the architecture to be completed by adding as many agents as we need. The conflicts between agents are managed by acting on their period of activity. We demonstrate in this paper the fact that the collaboration between many agents, each providing the manikin with an elementary behaviour, can provide the manikin with a coherent global virtual human behaviour.