An Approach for Indoor Path Computation among Obstacles that Considers User Dimension

An Approach for Indoor Path Computation among Obstacles that Considers User Dimension

Liu, L.
Zlatanova, S.

Architecture and The Built Environment

Urbanism

2015-12-17

People often transport objects within indoor environments, who need enough space for the motion. In such cases, the accessibility of indoor spaces relies on the dimensions, which includes a person and her/his operated objects. This paper proposes a new approach to avoid obstacles and compute indoor paths with respect to the user dimension. The approach excludes inaccessible spaces for a user in five steps: (1) compute the minimum distance between obstacles and find the inaccessible gaps; (2) group obstacles according to the inaccessible gaps; (3) identify groups of obstacles that influence the path between two locations; (4) compute boundaries for the selected groups; and (5) build a network in the accessible area around the obstacles in the room. Compared to the Minkowski sum method for outlining inaccessible spaces, the proposed approach generates simpler polygons for groups of obstacles that do not contain inner rings. The creation of a navigation network becomes easier based on these simple polygons. By using this approach, we can create user- and task-specific networks in advance. Alternatively, the accessible path can be generated on the fly before the user enters a room.

pedestrian indoor navigation
user dimension
path computation
accessibility

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:328f3e1d-0f4c-41ab-812b-37eb442e624f

MDPI

2220-9964

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi4042821

ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 4 (4), 2015

Institutional Repository

journal article

(c) 2015 The Author(s)
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.