Modeling Pedestrian Traffic in the Presence of Unmanned Mobile Robots

Interactions between pedestrians and robots are becoming more commonplace. In public areas, for example, robots may be used for information dissemination, security, or patrol tasks. Based upon existing literature in the field of human-robot interaction, the ISAPT simulation system was revised to model pedestrian behavior in the presence of an autonomous robot. Using an agent based modeling approach, pedestrians are statistically assigned one of four reported behaviors when a robot is encountered: stop to interact, stop to observe, slow down to look, and uninterested. The modeling methods for incorporating these behaviors include modifying a pedestrian’s existing agenda, while the pedestrian continues to make navigation decisions based on their overall utility function. Simulation results demonstrate effective integration of the ISAPT system’s added capability of modeling pedestrian-robot interaction. These results illustrate an effective means for adding this capability to microsimulation modeling systems.