Fuzzy logic controlled pedestrian groups in urban environments

Abstract

Populating an urban environment realistically with thousands of virtual humans is a challenging endeavour. Previous research into simulating the many facets of human behaviour has focused primarily on the control of an individual's movements. However, a large proportion of pedestrians in an urban environment walk in groups and this should be reflected in a simulation. This paper, therefore, proposes three fuzzy logic engines in order to adjust the speed of the multi level groups in urban environments. The proposed nested multiple fuzzy logic engines maintain the balance between desired speed, main group and sub group configurations. Thus, a natural and non-rigid group-based locomotion is achieved in urban settings. The realism of the presented techniques is verified by comparing them with statistics acquired from a study on real human behaviour. It is shown that the inter-personal distances between group members, the speed of individuals and the speeds of pedestrians in groups are consistent with their real counterparts. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.