Accessibility Assessment Via Workspace Estimation

The process of evaluating a built environment for accessibility is known as “accessibility assessment.” Determining accessibility is closely related to the problem of determining possible motions of a specific kinematic structure – given an environment and a mobile device, how much of the environment is accessible? Given these similarities, here the accessibility assessment process is reformulated as a motion planning problem. Rather than treating each of the degrees of freedom ‘equally’ while planning, we explore a hierarchical characteristic of all of the degrees of freedom when constructing the roadmap. The approach is demonstrated on simulated environments as well as on a student residence at York University.