An RT Component for Simulating People Movement in Public Space and its Application to Robot Motion Planner Development

This paper describes a software module for simulating “people movement” in public space such as shopping centers and cafeterias. We decompose people movement into global and local, and make a model of each of them. Global movement corresponds to following a route from a current position to a destination. In local movement, a person moves toward the next subgoal while avoiding surrounding persons and obstacles. We also model behavior specific to a cafeteria, such as queuing and searching for unoccupied seats. We implement these simulation algorithms in a simulator RT component, that can be used easily for development of robot motion planners, which are also realized as RT components. Various simulation experiments show the effectiveness of the simulation algorithms and the simulator RT component.