Towards realistic walk path simulation of single subjects

Abstract

Within the manufacturing industry, digital modelling activities and the simulation of human motion in particular, have emerged during the last decades. For the use-case of walk path planning, however, recent path planning approaches on the one hand reveal drawbacks in terms of realism and naturalness of motion. On the other hand, the generation of variant-rich travel routes by means of modeling the statistical nature of human motion has not been explored yet. In order to contribute to a better prediction quality of planning models, this paper therefore presents an approach for realistically simulating walk paths of single subjects. In order to take into consideration the variability of human locomotion, a statistical model describing human motion in a two-dimensional bird's eye view is presented. This model is generated from a comprehensive database (20 000 steps) of captured human motion and covers a wide range of gait variants. In order to obtain short and collision-free trajectories, this approach is combined with a path planning algorithm. The utilized hybrid A* path planner can be regarded as an orchestration-instance, stitching together succeeding left and right steps, which were drawn from the statistical motion model. Although being initially designed for industrial purposes, this method can be applied to a wide range of use-cases beyond automotive walk path planning. To underline the evident benefits of the proposed approach, the novel motion planner's technical performance is demonstrated in an evaluation.