# Body-rotation behavior of pedestrians for collision avoidance in passing and cross flow

## TL;DR

This study investigates how pedestrians rotate their bodies to avoid collisions in narrow corridors and cross-flow situations, providing experimental data and a preliminary model to understand and simulate this behavior.

## Contribution

It offers a quantitative analysis of body-rotation during pedestrian passing and cross-flow, and introduces a model to simulate this collision avoidance behavior.

## Key findings

- Pedestrians rotate their bodies when corridor width is less than combined widths.
- Body rotation is essential for collision avoidance in complex pedestrian flows.
- A preliminary model successfully simulates observed body deviation during passing.

## Abstract

We observe body-rotation behavior of pedestrians to avoid others when they are moving in congested situations. In such cases, body orientation often differs from walking direction, i.e., pedestrians step sideways. In this paper, we focused on a deviation between body orientation and walking direction during collision avoidance by body rotation for counter-flows in narrow corridors quantitatively. We conducted simple experiments in which two pedestrians passed each other. We found that pedestrians rotated their bodies when the width of the corridor was smaller than the sum of the widths of the two pedestrians. This behavior was explained by analyzing the geometry of two ellipses circumscribing each other in a narrow corridor. Moreover, we developed a preliminary model and succeeded to simulate the deviation between body orientation and walking direction during passing observed in the experiments. Furthermore, we performed a cross-flow experiment, which is much more complex and realistic than the passing experiments and confirmed that body-rotation behavior is also an indispensable factor for complex and realistic scenarios.