Autonomous Navigation for Personal Mobility Vehicles Considering Passenger Tolerance to Approaching Pedestrians

There are high expectations for autonomous personal mobility vehicles (PMVs) to support the mobility of older people. Autonomous navigation systems are being developed to assist mobility in public areas with mixed pedestrian traffic, such as airports and shopping malls. For autonomous navigation of PMVs, achieving both comfort and efficiency, even in crowded environments, is important. In this study, we focused on the characteristic of passenger tolerance, in which a passenger’s discomfort is relatively small concerning an approaching pedestrian. The objective was to propose an efficient autonomous navigation method without increasing passenger discomfort, considering the characteristics of passenger tolerance. First, the passenger tolerance characteristics were clarified through data analysis of a previous study’s dataset and a newly collected dataset. Next, a path-planning method considering the characteristics was proposed, and the proposed method was evaluated by numerical simulations. The evaluation results showed that the proposed method has a potential to achieve efficient autonomous navigation in crowded environments.