Reciprocal Velocity Obstacles (RVO) is an algorithm that was discovered by the three researchers Jur van den Berg, Ming C. Lin, and Dinesh Manocha in 2008 in their paper "Reciprocal Velocity Obstacles for Real-Time Multi-Agent Navigation".
The RVO algorithm is path agnostic, which means that it is not aware of the path that the agent is following, nor the navmesh where the agent is navigating. Moreover, each agent navigates independently of one another without explicit communication. As a result, RVO is very fast to run, even for a large number of agents, and provides sufficient realistic behavior if the number of incoming collisions is limited.
