Autonomous navigation of a personal transporter within moving human groups using reactive control

Abstract

If a vehicle has to drive autonomously in an area with mostly pedestrian traffic and thus needs to share the free space with pedestrians it has to safely navigate in this environment. A pedestrian area lacks fixed lanes and definite traffic rules which leads to more complex paths. Classical path planning in a partially known environment with multiple moving pedestrians is a hard planning problem. Just the task of accurately predicting the individual path of multiple pedestrians in a group accounting for all interactions between the different persons over more than a few seconds is as good as impossible. Using this faulty prediction as a foundation for a path planning algorithm will produce a flawed plan. However such an environment is easy for humans or animals to navigate, avoidance of other persons and moving in a group of pedestrians happens almost unconsciously. In this paper a simple way of autonomously navigating such an environment by using a pure reactive control based on a few simple rules is explored. This method doesn't need a completely known environment, doesn't plan ahead, is simple to implement and can react quick to changes in the environment. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.