Collision Avoidance System

Hello everyone! I've been thinking about creating a collision avoidance system for Beam.NG. I saw in the devblog for 0.9 the following: "Simple AI crash detection. AI detects a crash and engages in maneuvers to get out of it." This is for the AI, not someone that's freeroaming. I imagine it can't be that hard. Here's a few ideas on how I'd go about this:

1. Create an invisible cone with the top fixed on the rear view mirror and the base pointed out in front of the car. This would look like the selected headlights on a car in the map editor. If another vehicle passes into this cone, the car would measure the distance and rate of speed to apply the appropriate amount of braking power.
2. This idea builds off of number one, where I could have an invisible plane mounted on the front bumper, waiting to detect another vehicle.

If I were to go about this, I'd probably take some code from the postcrashbrake controller because that has the code that applies the brakes until the vehicle is stopped. The hard part would be the detecting another vehicle in front of you idea.

Any advice on where to start or how to make this easier is greatly appreciated.

 

Are triggers a thing yet? Back in RoR we used to have beams that were called triggers. When you compressed them beyond a particular length they would "Trigger" a command key (could be any key on the keyboard pretty much). Back then I made an invisible really light bumper with these triggers and when I pressed it to far against something it would hit the brakes... really crude, but it did work... Ironically though there was no way to disable this so once you stopped... you stopped

My best bet for Beam would be that you would have to do something similar but with LUA... not sure how one would accomplish this though.

 

How AI avoids collisions? Why not have AI run in a background and grant control of brakes for AI when collision detection of AI triggers?

 

In the update they added castRay which should help detect obstacles.

• Exposed new Lua function “castRay”, which can be used in the game engine thread to detect obstacles (will impact performance, use with caution)

Coronalabs has a good writeup on this.
https://coronalabs.com/blog/2013/05/07/physics-raycasting-and-reflection/

 

Bless you, thanks!

 

I played around with the feature they mentioned where the AI avoids accidents. It doesn't stop if there's something in front of it. The car attempts to maintain control if it gets in an accident. For example, I clipped the tail of the D15, it corrected the fishtailing, and applied the brakes.