Autonomous Pedestrians

Abstract

We address the difficult open problem of emulating the rich complexity of real pedestrians in urban environments. Our artificial life approach integrates motor, perceptual, behavioral, and cognitive components within a model of pedestrians as individuals. Our comprehensive model features innovations in these components, as well as in their combination, yielding results of unprecedented fidelity and complexity for fully autonomous multi-human simulation in a large urban environment. We represent the environment using hierarchical data structures, which efficiently support the perceptual queries of the autonomous pedestrians that drive their behavioral responses and sustain their ability to plan their actions on local and global scales.