Intelligent vehicles in pedestrian environments

This paper concerns research aimed at developing an intelligent vehicle able to share the environment and to interact sympathetically with humans. This would oer new applications for goods and people transportation not only within outdoor restricted trac areas (parks and cities) but also in indoor environments such as industrial and service areas (manufacturing, stations, airports). In relation to the eld of intelligent vehicles and mobile robotics, the motion planning and control problems are well-known research subjects. However nowadays mobile robots are not able to operate in rapidly changing semi-structured or unstructured crowded human environments, with robots not used to the presence of many humans and with people not used to the presence of robots. In relation to pedestrian behaviour most eort in recent research is addressed to understand how people move around to nd out optimality criteria for space design. The basic idea of the proposed research is to identify the rules which describe pedestrian behaviour and to transfer them to the intelligent mobile robot in such a way to make it, rst, able to operate in complex and rapidly changing environments, secondly to do it as a pedestrian, thus minimising its interactions and potential disturbance to pedestrian ows.