Experimental study on dynamics characteristic parameter of turning behavior in self-driven mechanism

When changing their walking direction, pedestrians would choose different strategies for different turning angles. Step turn is for a small angle, and spin turn is for a large angle. However, previous studies on the mechanism of individual pedestrian modeling have rarely focused on this phenomenon. To clarify this point, this study performed experiments on individuals to investigate the turning process in three different physical environments—brightness, darkness with evacuation sign, and darkness without evacuation sign. Based on the self-driven mechanism, we propose a dynamical parameter to describe the features of individual turning behavior, i.e., turning scale. The experimental results indicate that when the turning radius is small, the pedestrian would apply significantly more force to increase the centripetal acceleration than the tangential acceleration to make the turn. Hereby, our work validates the existence of different turning strategies for different turning angles. Further, the difference in the choice of strategies in different physical environments is analyzed. The research achievements in this work provide a new insight to investigate pedestrian behavior, and provide data support for modeling individual pedestrian movements more accurately.