People Movement Simulation in Public Space and Its Application to Robot Motion Planner Development

Abstract

This paper describes people movement simulation in public space such as shopping centers and cafeteria. We decompose people movements into global and local ones, and make a model for each of them. The global movement corresponds to following a route from the current position to the destination, and is represented by a path on a spatial network whose nodes are defined as divided regions of the whole environment. The local movement is the behavior that a person avoids surrounding people and obstacles, and is modeled by a potential method. We also model the behaviors specific to the cafeteria, such as queuing and the search of free seats. As an application of the simulator, we developed a path planning simulation environment by combining the simulator and a path planner. We performed various simulation experiments on people movement and robot path planning. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the simulation.