Measuring and modeling the speed of human navigation

Navigation, the goal-related movement through space and time to reach a destination, is a fundamental human activity. Geographers, physiologists, anthropologists, and psychologists have long been interested in the spatial and temporal aspects of navigation speed. Hikers, search and rescue teams, firefighters, the military, and others navigate on foot, and their success depends on understanding how the dynamics of foot-based navigation affect individual capabilities. This research modeled the speed of movement of humans engaged in navigation in wooded environments with varied terrain. Movement models were developed using spatiotemporal analysis of multiple subjects’ trajectories. Speed estimates were collected via satellite positioning from 200 subjects engaged in foot-based navigation. Trajectory data were merged with land-cover data to analyze human navigation over varying slopes and terrain. Generalizing these characteristics provided a model of navigational speed of movement from an origin to a destination along an unknown route. Tobler’s hiking function and Naismith’s rule were used in an analysis of the trajectory data. The model created from this study was shown to outperform those classic human movement speed estimators by predicting route completion time within 10% accuracy (M = 11.1min, 95% CI 9.8, 12.4] min). These models help explain the human dynamics of navigation.]