Robot navigation according to the characteristics of pedestrian flow

摘要

In recent years, service robots have tended to have the ability to move autonomously in an environment in which they co-exist with humans. Thus, the robots must engage in obstacle avoidance and arrive at the goal point. The potential method is one of the path planning methods for obstacle avoidance. Because pedestrian is moving obstacle, he/she may go outside of artificial potential in a similar method suggested by a previous study. However, if the robot avoids collision too securely, robot's performance is limited so a trade-off problem arises between collision avoidance and robot's performance. A potential method requires a function that allows a robot to plan an effective path without collision with pedestrian by predicting a pedestrian's next position during robot operation. In this study, we develop a robot navigation method according to the characteristics of pedestrian flow. We spread a repulsive potential that adapts the pedestrian potential equation based on the route estimation model. In the proposed method, the repulsive potential changes depending on the position or the velocity of the pedestrian. The robot plans a path without including unnecessary potential, according to the pedestrian's route estimation range. Compared with the previous potential method, wherein the potential field is distributed equally around a pedestrian the same way as a static obstacle, the proposed method enables the robot to plan an effective path with pedestrian characteristics. The proposed method's effectiveness is demonstrated through experiments.