Posts from Monday, March 28th, 2016

This is a thing I’ve been trying to figure out in my spare time, mostly noodling about in my head with various ideas when I have some down time, and now I want to know if there’s a formal answer of some sort.  It goes like this: in a lot of situations, ranging from airplane autopilots to self-driving cars (I think) to videogames, there are times when you want a moving object to get itself as precisely as possible with a known path.  For example, having the autopilot line up with the approach path for a runway.

So how is that done?  What’s the general approach to programming a moving thing to find, with decent efficiency, its way onto a given path in 3D space?  Or in 2D space, if that’s easier to understand?  I can think of a few naïve approaches, but none of them seem anywhere near robust enough to be trusted.

• Pathfinding was published on Monday, March 28th, 2016.
• It was assigned to the Questions category.
• There have been fourteen replies.