Autonomous Navigation Method Considering Passenger Comfort Recognition for Personal Mobility Vehicles in Crowded Pedestrian Spaces

Autonomous navigation systems for personal mobility vehicles are being developed to support mobility in large-scale facilities such as airports and shopping malls where pedestrians coexist. Passenger comfort, such as not causing anxiety to the passengers, is one of the required functions of autonomous navigation. This study aims to achieve the following two goals. The first goal is to clarify the characteristics of passenger comfort recognition, that is, how the passenger feels comfortable depending on the behavior of the surrounding pedestrians and the vehicle when the personal mobility vehicle moves autonomously in a crowded environment. The second goal is to propose a novel autonomous navigation method based on the clarified characteristics of passenger comfort recognition. To achieve the goals, first, an experiment was conducted to obtain a subjective assessment of passenger comfort using a VR simulator. By focusing on situation awareness as a process affecting passenger comfort recognition, the influence of situation awareness on passenger comfort recognition was analyzed, and the characteristics of passenger comfort recognition were discussed. Based on the characteristics, requirements for comfortable autonomous navigation were set, and a novel autonomous navigation method was proposed. Numerical simulation results showed that the proposed method satisfies the requirements and is a valid method to realize comfortable autonomous navigation in crowded pedestrian spaces.