Design and HIL setup of an autonomous vehicle for crowded environments

Within the last decade, we are witnessing the introduction of intelligent vehicles on our roadways. There is a similar need of intelligent transportation vehicles inside buildings such as airports or shopping malls. These intelligent vehicles can transfer elderly, disabled, or people with heavy luggage. This paper describes an intelligent vehicle that can autonomously transport people in indoor and outdoor areas where pedestrians exist. During operation along pedestrians, detecting them and updating trajectories to avoid collision is not always feasible. In some cases, this leads to a vehicle that is unable to move. In literature, this problem is labeled as the freezing robot problem. This paper proposes an approach to solve this problem by interaction with pedestrians. In order to validate the approach, Simulink simulations and hardware in the loop simulations are performed with different environment scenarios.