Visibility analysis for autonomous vehicle comfortable navigation

This work introduces a 3D visibility model for comfortable autonomous vehicles. The model computes a visibility index based on the pose of the wheelchair within the environment. We correlate this index with human navigational comfort (discomfort) and we discuss the importance of modeling visibility to improve human riding comfort. The proposed approach models the 3D visual field of view combined with a two-layered environmental representation. The field of view is modeled with information from the pose of the robot, a 3D laser sensor and a two-layered environmental representation composed of a 3D geometric map with traversale area information. Human navigational discomfort was extracted from participants riding the autonomous wheelchair. Results show that there is fair correlation between poor visibility locations (e.g., blind corners) and human discomfort. The approach can model places with identical traversable characteristics but different visibility and it differentiates visibility characteristics according to traveling direction.