Search Results (11)

Understanding pedestrian perceptions and attitudes is crucial for promoting walking as a daily transportation mode for sustainable mobility and the effective development of smart cities. Pedestrian preferences, shaped by factors such as age, gender, and urban infrastructure, play a pivotal role in travel behaviors. Based on a survey study, this paper examines the impact of individual and urban factors on pedestrian perceptions and attitudes towards walking in the cities of Bologna and Porto. Results reveal that individuals generally value short, safe, and green walking routes, appreciating walking for physical activity, cost savings, and time efficiency. Disliked aspects include adverse weather conditions and walking on inadequate sidewalks. Through carrying out Chi-square statistical analysis tests, a variety of significant correlations between individual and urban variables have been revealed on what people like or dislike about walking. For instance, males, young individuals, and students were more likely to prefer short pedestrian routes, while adults and seniors favored safe and green routes. These findings can assist urban planners in identifying factors that make walking both convenient and enjoyable and in supporting sustainable urban mobility policies. Full article

This study presents the development of a route planner, called Mission Planner, for an agricultural weeding robot that generates efficient and safe routes both in the field and on the farm using a graph-based approach. This planner optimizes the robot’s motion throughout the farm and performs weed management tasks tailored for high-power laser devices in narrow-row crops (wheat, barley, etc.) and wide-row crops (sugar beet, maize, etc.). Three main algorithms were integrated: Dijkstra’s algorithm to find the most optimal route on the farm, the VRMP (Visibility Road-Map Planner) method to select the route within cultivated fields when roads are not visible, and an improved version of the Hamiltonian path to find the best route between the crop lines. The results support the effectiveness of the strategies implemented, demonstrating that a robot can safely and efficiently navigate through the entire farm and perform an agricultural treatment, in this case study, in laser-based weed management. In addition, it was found that the route planner reduced the robot’s operation time, thus improving the overall efficiency of precision agriculture. Full article

The successful deployment of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) requires the safe integration of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft in non-segregated airspace. However, a lack of practical deployment demonstrations can slow the regulatory progress. This study presents a practical deployment framework for the integration of eVTOL aircraft into public airspace, in accordance with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) special airworthiness criteria. This study focused on a corporate use case to provide a comprehensive scenario for enhancing intra-company mobility. The scenario supports early implementation and demonstration goals by removing reliance on air traffic management systems or air traffic controller separation services. The practical deployment framework included facility selection, route planning, terrain mapping, collision avoidance, aircraft selection, infrastructure requirements, vertiport placement, electric chargers, ground handling, operational staff, and cost estimates. Planners can use the framework as a template to inform the implementation of real-world AAM services using eVTOL aircraft. Full article

Route planning considering terrain information is useful for the navigation of autonomous ground vehicles (AGV) on complicated terrain surfaces, such as mountains with rivers. For instance, an AGV in mountains cannot cross a river or a valley that is too steep. This article addresses a novel route-planning algorithm that is time-efficient in building a sub-optimal route considering terrain information. In order to construct a route from the start to the end point in a time-efficient manner, we simulate two virtual vehicles that deploy virtual nodes iteratively, such that the connected node network can be formed. The generated node network serves as a topological map for a real AGV, and we construct the shortest route from the start to the end point utilizing the network. The route is weighted considering the route length, the steepness of the route, and the traversibility of the route. Through MATLAB simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed route-planning algorithm by comparing it with RRT-star planners. Full article

Today, automobile dependency constantly causes traffic congestion, delays, reduced access, increased fuel and energy consumption, and environmental emissions. Automobile dependency has caused many direct and indirect transportation problems that may influence our life. Urban planners and transportation engineers seek to improve transport networks considering social issues. One of the most successful solutions for advocating sustainable transport is transit-oriented development (TOD). Another solution that planners encourage to use is designing the roadways based on a complete street approach, which is a system that provides safe, convenient, and comfortable travel and increases accessibility for users of all ages regardless of their transport modes. The present study employed the saturated roads that have heavy traffic most of the time and public transport e-ticket data to investigate the potential complete streets in Qazvin. An online questionnaire was developed using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method based on the TOD and the complete street framework to investigate the essential criteria for redesigning the network based on the active transport approach. Thus, after analyzing the six criteria (density, diversity, distance, accessibility, demand management, and design) and eight sub-criteria (pedestrian flow, pedestrian density, connectivity, safety, bike route, bus route, road width, and urban tree canopy index), the proposed active transport network emerged and results show that five high priority streets were identified to be considered as a solution. Full article

Due to significant changes in Cairo’s streets today, young children may face difficulties finding opportunities to be safe and active. They can encounter low independent mobility, limiting their access to places in their neighborhoods, and can have poor access to their schools. This study aims to examine governmental primary school children’s access to schools in their neighborhoods after street modifications in Heliopolis, Cairo, seeking to evaluate the potential risks to child pedestrians. This will subsequently aid in developing a methodology for consistently and fairly evaluating hazards along the route to schools. A survey of six governmental primary schools in Heliopolis, Cairo, was conducted through interviews with children and their parents. Furthermore, a behavioral map of the local neighborhood was completed by children (7–12 years old) of six primary schools from the areas surrounding their schools in which the modifications took place. The results indicate that the most common ways of travelling to school, according to the questionnaire, are either by public transportation (30%) or by a small van/private bus (42%). More than half of the children expressed their wish to walk or cycle to school. The result also found that 69% of the children expressed anxiety about crossing streets. In conclusion, for some children, opportunities to be active in the local neighborhood may be limited due to the new modifications to the streets, resulting in limited independent mobility. To promote a sense of neighborhood safety and increase access to neighborhood public spaces, it is important to work with urban planners and local governments. Full article

Path planning is necessary in many applications using unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). The main class of tasks is the planning of safe routes with minimal energy costs and/or minimal levels of emitted physical and information signals. Since the action planner is on board the UUV, the main focus is on methods and algorithms that allow it to build reference trajectories while minimizing the number of calculations. The study is devoted to the problem of the optimal route planning for a UUV with a non-uniform radiation pattern. The problem is stated in the form of two point variational problem for which necessary and sufficient optimality conditions are proved. Particular attention is paid to cases where optimality conditions are not met. These cases are directly related to found specific forms of a radiation pattern. Sufficient optimality conditions are extended on the class of two-link and multi-link motion paths. Software tools have been developed and computer simulations have been performed for various types of radiation patterns. Full article

Development of electromobility in urban areas requires an appropriate level of vehicle charging infrastructure. Numerous methods for siting of charging stations have been developed to date, and they appear to be delivering diverse outcomes for the same area, which is why local authorities face the problem of choosing the right station layout. The solution proposed in this article is to use a travel planner to evaluate the distribution of charging stations over the area of a metropolis. The decision making support is achieved by determining optimal travel routes for electric vehicles according to their initial state of charge for the three selected station siting methods. The evaluation focused on the following three aspects: (1) number of travels that cannot be made (due to the lack of a charging station at a certain distance around the start point), (2) extension of the travel caused by the need to recharge the vehicle on-route, and (3) additional energy consumption by electric vehicles required to reach the charging station (necessity of departing from the optimal route). An analysis of the results has made it possible to determine a solution which is superior to others. For the case study analysed in the paper, i.e., the territory of the Metropolis of Upper Silesia and Dabrową Basin (Górnośląsko-Zagłębiowska Metropolia, GZM), the distribution of charging stations established in line with method I has returned the best results. What the method in question also makes possible is to indicate a safe minimum energy reserve to complete the travel by eliminating situations of unexpected vehicle immobilisation due to on-route energy depletion and by minimising the phenomenon referred to as range anxiety. Full article

Planning and executing missions in terms of trajectory generation are challenging problems in the operational phase of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) lifecycle. The growing adoption of UAVs in several civil applications requires the definition of precise procedures and tools to safely manage UAV missions that may involve flight over populated areas. The paper aims at providing a contribution toward the definition of a reliable environment, called FLIP (flight planner) for route planning and risk evaluation in the framework of mini- and micro-UAV missions over populated areas. The environment represents a decision support system (DSS) for UAV operators and other decision makers, like airports authorities and aviation agencies. A new ICT tool integrating an innovative procedure for evaluating the risk related to the use of UAV over populated areas is proposed. Full article

Safety concerns are among the most prevalent deterrents for bicycling. The provision of adequate bicycling infrastructure is considered as one of the most efficient means to increase cycling safety. However, limited public funding does not always allow agencies to implement cycling infrastructure improvements at the desirable level. Thus, bicycle trip planners can at least partly alleviate the lack of adequate infrastructure by recommending optimal routes in terms of safety. The presented study provides a systematic review of 35 bicycle routing applications and analyses to which degree they promote safe bicycling. The results show that most trip planners lack corresponding routing options and therefore do not sufficiently address safety concerns of bicyclists. Based on these findings, we developed recommendations on how to better address bicycling safety in routing portals. We suggest employing current communication technology and analysis to consider safety concerns more explicitly. Full article

Route planning is a key technology for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to fly reliably and safely in the presence of a threat environment. Existing route planning methods are mainly based on the simulation scene, whereas approaches based on the virtual globe platform have rarely been reported. In this paper, a new planning space for the virtual globe and the planner is proposed and a common threat model is constructed for threats including a no-fly zone, hazardous weather, radar coverage area, missile killing zone and dynamic threats. Additionally, an improved ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is developed to enhance route planning efficiency and terrain masking ability. Our route planning methods are optimized on the virtual globe platform for practicability. A route planning system and six types of planners were developed and implemented on the virtual globe platform. Finally, our evaluation results demonstrate that our optimum planner has better performance in terms of fuel consumption, terrain masking, and risk avoidance. Experiments also demonstrate that the method and system described in this paper can be used to perform global route planning and mission operations. Full article