Analysis of environmental factors limiting humans´ obstacle avoidance ability

We conjecture that action intelligence of humans could contribute to the path-planning problem of autonomous mobile robot. In order to achieve the imitation of such action intelligence on a robot, besides action knowledge acquisition, we need to further learn more about the characteristics of humans´ action intelligence. In this paper, from the viewpoint of attributes of an obstacle such as number, size and speed, we focus on analysis of environmental factors that could restrict humans´ obstacle avoidance ability. Based on an obstacle avoidance simulator, the characteristics of humans´ obstacle avoidance are analyzed and the limitation of humans´ obstacle avoidance was verified, especially such limitation could be quantified to some parameters, mainly the number of obstacles in environment. Finally, the guidelines for knowledge acquisition are summarized: under the environment with static obstacles, it is enough to extract the knowledge under the environment with one obstacle; under the environment with mobile obstacles, it is enough to extract the knowledge within limitation of humans for obstacle avoidance.