Award Date

8-1-2014

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE)

Department

Electrical Engineering

First Committee Member

Pushkin Kachroo

Second Committee Member

Ke-Xun Sun

Third Committee Member

Yingtao Jiang

Fourth Committee Member

Zhonghai Ding

Number of Pages

90

Abstract

According to Traveler opinion and perception survey of 2005, 107.4 million Americans use walking as regular mode of travel, which amounts to 51% of American population. In 2009, 4092 pedestrian fatalities have been reported nationwide with a fatality rate of 1.33 which totals 59,000 crashes. Also, pedestrians are over represented in crash data by accounting more than 12% of fatalities but on 10.9% of trips. This makes a perfect case for understanding the causes behind such statistics, calling for a continuous research on pedestrians walking behavior and their interactions with surroundings.

Current research in pedestrian simulation focuses on surveys and mathematical simulation models such as macroscopic and microscopic dynamic models involves autonomous entities. The surveys represent the perception of individual while mathematical simulation severely limits the capacity to capture effect of human factors in the understanding of pedestrian interactions. Complicated psychological models are used to a certain extent for understanding of such problems but are incapable to estimate the diversity of human behavior. To capture tendencies of people, they need to be a part of research, under a safe and controlled environment.

In this thesis, an attempt has been made to develop a module which can be used to track human walk gesture and map it to actual human walk. Then, this module could be implemented in a system aimed to understand pedestrian behavior. Following are the accomplishments of this thesis.

* Built an API to use with software interface to capture human motion

- Explored arduino based wearable interface to capture human motion.

- Explored Kinect based video interface to capture human motion.

- Defined gestures and identified configurations for least difficult setup and calibration process.

- Wrote the software interface for a Kinect based system (video interface).

* Built a mathematical framework for abstracted dynamical system, for the purpose of pedestrian interface in simulation engine.

- Obtained mathematical model for human walk.

- Obtained conversion to non-holonomical system for human walk.

- Programmed the mathematical model into the API.

Eventually this is expected to contribute towards state-of-the-art researches which aim at understanding pedestrian dynamics in transportation safety and planning. The module described is expected to work real-time as a separate entity.

Keywords

Abstracted Dynamical system; Kinect (Programmable controller); Kinematics; Pedestrians; Walking – Computer simulation

Disciplines

Computer Engineering | Computer Sciences | Electrical and Computer Engineering | Kinesiology

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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