Moving characteristics of “blind” people evacuating from a room

Most studies on pedestrian dynamics are based on people with visibility, but evacuation experiments without visibility are relatively rare. Nevertheless, study of human´s behavior without visibility is also important, especially for emergency evacuation in fire. In emergency evacuation, people may have not much visibility because of smoke. Then we carried out experimental research on “blind” people. In our study, different from previous researches, we studied characteristics of pedestrian behaviors within different widths of one exit, different locations of two exits and also enlarged the room size and number of pedestrians. We focus on the bunch-forming phenomenon and human´s behavior without visibility. The evacuation process was observed and recorded by video cameras. Different from the people with visibility, blindfolded people showed a typical behavior. During the evacuation, the flow of people is discovered divided into several bunches. Based on the video observation and data statistics, it is found that no jamming through exit even the density near the exit reaches 3.29 people/m². Study on the trajectories of people movement shows that the velocity of blindfolded people obeys Gaussian distribution. In addition, the evacuation in a two exit room is more effective when two alternative exits are used more approximately.