When Helbing meets Laumond: The Headed Social Force Model

Abstract

The increased diffusion of service robots operating in tight collaboration with humans has renewed the interest of the scientific community towards realistic human motion models. In this paper, we present the Headed Social Force Model, a modeling approach enriching Helbing's Social ForceModel with Laumond's human locomotion models. The proposed solution is shown to inherit the best features of either models, being able to reliably reproduce pedestrians' motions both in free space and in highly crowded environments. Extensive numerical simulations are presented in order to evaluate the performance under very different operating conditions.