Self-aware Pedestrians Modeling for Testing Autonomous Vehicles in Simulation

Abstract

: With the rise of autonomous vehicles in the urban environment, the focus is also shifted towards autonomous vehicles in pedestrian zones. Pedestrian safety becomes the primary concern in such zones. Autonomous systems for these situations need thorough testing before its deployment in the real-world to ensure safety. Therefore, developing testbeds that resemble the real-world for autonomous vehicles testing in pedestrian zones are highly critical. The proposed work focuses on the modeling of pedestrian behaviors in a simulated environment for realizing autonomous vehicles in the pedestrian zones. The virtual pedestrians are modeled with the self-awareness to avoid static and dynamic obstacles when progressing towards its goal. The goal is also to have a minimum number of parameters to generate various test scenarios with realistic behaving pedestrians for the autonomous systems. The proposed system is evaluated using individual and group of virtual pedestrians. It can be seen from the experiments that simulated pedestrians show trajectories which resemble the trajectories of pedestrians in the real-world for that particular situation.