Analysis of Pedestrian Navigation Using Cellular Phones

Navigation services for pedestrians are spreading in recent years. Our approach to provide personal navigation is to build a multiagent system that assigns one guiding agent to each human. This paper attempts to demonstrate a design implication of the guiding agent. In the navigation experiment where a pedestrian using a map on a GPScapable cellular phone was guided by a distant navigator, we observed the communication between them by conversation analysis. The result suggests that information required by a pedestrian were the current location, the current direction and a proper route toward a destination. The communications between a pedestrian and a navigator were based on a navigation map or a movement history. When a pedestrian did not understand the map adequately, navigation sometimes failed due to the lack of communication basis.