Environmental Map Building to Describe Walking Dynamics for Determination of Spatial Feature of Walking Activity

Path planning in a dynamic environment is required not only efficiently but also with high safety. To achieve this, it is necessary to understand people’s walking activity in the space, and studies of planning paths focused on walking paths of pedestrian have been widely done. In these studies, information getting from walking paths does not include spatial features of people’s walking activity such as dynamics of their walking. A walking behavior is not always smooth from the viewpoints of changes of walking speed and moving directions. For example, people should accelerate or decelerate their walking speed according to environmental settings or their purposes of walking. In addition, moving directions of people’s walking also depend on the environmental structures and settings. Therefore, people’s walking activity should be understood including walking dynamics. To apply the information of the walking activity to the path planning for mobile robot navigation, there are two requirements; one is that the information should be described in form that a robot system is able to use, and another one is that it should be described without lacking spatial information. To realize these, we propose that an environmental map describing the walking activity of people including walking dynamics. More specifically, we build the environmental map as a grid map that is one of the often-used maps for a mobile robot. From the results of the experiment, it was shown that the proposed environmental map was possible to determine spatial features.