Basic pathfinding with obstacle avoidance in a continuous 2D space

Question

I'm writing a simulation in which a creature object should be able to move towards some other arbitrary object in the environment, sliding around obstacles rather than doing any intelligent pathfinding. I'm not trying to have it plan a path -- just to move in one general direction, and bounce around obstacles.

It's a 2D environment (overhead view), and every object has a bounding rectangle for collision detection. There is no grid, and I am not looking for A* solution.

I haven't been able to find any tutorials on this kind of "dumb" collision-based pathfinding, so I might not be describing this using the most common terms.

Any recommendations on how to implement this (or links to tutorials)?

Answer 1

Expanding on what Guillaume said about obstacle avoidance, a technique that would work well for you is anti-gravity movement. You treat local obstacles as point sources of antigravity, the destination as gravity, and your computer controlled character will slip (like soap!) around the obstacles to get to the destination.