Experimental Investigation on the Pair Interaction Between Pedestrians

Abstract

Both experimental and numerical studies indicate local interaction among pedestrians plays an important role in determining the self-organization of pedestrian traffic. However, little is know to the form of the interaction. We ex- plore the fundamental interaction between pedestrians by performing controlled experiments in a long narrow channel where pedestrians were asked to first walk- ing freely in the channel, then to evade a standing still pedestrian in the middle of the channel. Trajectories of these pedestrians extracted from the video-recordings of the experiments were then used to analyze detailed microscopic moving fea- tures. Averaged change of speed as well as the change of direction of these pede- strians was then calculated. An angular and metric distance based interaction map reviewing the laws ruling the behavioral changes when a pedestrian interacts with others was detailed. This study provides further insights to the fundamental indi- vidual level interaction between pedestrians for understanding the pedestrian dy- namic and is expected to be helpful in evacuation analysis.