Robot navigation according to the characteristics of pedestrian flow

摘要

In recent years, service robots have advanced toward having to the ability to move autonomously in an environment in which they co-exist with humans. Thus, the robots must engage in obstacle avoidance to arrive at their goal point. In our previous research, we developed the artificial potential based method that the robot to plans an effective path simulating pedestrian characteristics by gently changing its moving distance. The repulsive potential changes depend on the pedestrian's characteristics. Using our idea, the robot can plan a path without including unnecessary potential changes, according to the pedestrian's route estimation range. Thus, our idea realizes both an effective path and pedestrian avoidance. In this method, the characteristics of the pedestrian are constant. However, pedestrian's walking characteristics are different depending on the environment that pedestrian's walking direction is various in free space model like shopping mall, in contrast, they are determined along the route in corridor model like an office. Therefore, the pedestrian's characteristic model should be changed depend on environment. Because the number of the avoiding-path case is unlimited, we propose the pedestrian potential model is applicable for any environments in this study. In the proposed method, the robot determines the pedestrian's position and plans the avoiding-path, which is reflected in the pedestrian's repulsive potential spread. The value of spread is calculated and changes depending on the pedestrian's position in real-time. We confirmed the proposed method is efficient by comparing experiment with the previous method, where the spread potential constant. The proposed method's effectiveness was confirmed through experiment with the prototype robot.