Robot-Guided Evacuation as a Paradigm for Human-Robot Interaction Research

Wagner, Alan R.

doi:10.3389/frobt.2021.701938

Cited by 17 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Emergency evacuation can be a chaotic situation defined by the need to relocate a possibly large number of people to safety without causing choke points that slow the evacuation process [1], [2]. Robots may be developed to serve as instantaneous first responders immediately reacting to an emergency by contacting the authorities and guiding people to safety [3]. Compared to traditional guidance from stationary signage, robot-guided emergency evacuation offers many advantages [4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-Robot-Guided Crowd Evacuation: Two-Scale Modeling and Control Based on Mean-Field Hydrodynamic Models

Zheng¹,

Yuan²,

Nayyar³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Emergency evacuation describes a complex situation involving time-critical decision-making by evacuees. Mobile robots are being actively explored as a potential solution to provide timely guidance. In this work, we study a robot-guided crowd evacuation problem where a small group of robots is used to guide a large human crowd to safe locations. The challenge lies in how to utilize micro-level human-robot interactions to indirectly influence a population that significantly outnumbers the robots to achieve the collective evacuation objective. To address the challenge, we follow a two-scale modeling strategy and explore mean-field hydrodynamic models which consist of a family of microscopic social-force models that explicitly describe how human movements are locally affected by other humans, the environment, and the robots, and associated macroscopic equations for the temporal and spatial evolution of the crowd density and flow velocity. We design controllers for the robots such that they not only automatically explore the environment (with unknown dynamic obstacles) to cover it as much as possible but also dynamically adjust the directions of their local navigation force fields based on the real-time macro-states of the crowd to guide the crowd to a safe location. We prove the stability of the proposed evacuation algorithm and conduct a series of simulations (involving unknown dynamic obstacles) to validate the performance of the algorithm.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-Robot-Guided Crowd Evacuation: Two-Scale Modeling and Control Based on Mean-Field Hydrodynamic Models

Zheng¹,

Yuan²,

Nayyar³

et al. 2023

Preprint

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“…Conducting such studies entails a variety of logistical challenges, from robotic perception and navigation issues to creating a sense of genuine peril (e.g., by unexpectedly activating smoke alarms and smoke machines). The inherent difficulty of mounting convincing sham emergencies that are acceptable to an institutional review board and do not inadvertently endanger participants deters progress in this area [4]. We have therefore focused our efforts on the development of a novel Virtual Reality (VR) testbed for evaluating human-robot crisis paradigms [5].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating Human-Robot Overtrust During Crises

Holbrook¹

2023

Preprint

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Our research focuses on human-robot interaction (HRI) during life-or-death emergencies. We have developed an immersive virtual reality (VR) testbed because conducting real-world crisis simulations would pose prohibitive logistical difficulties, as well as to leverage the affordances of VR technology to measure motor behavior (e.g., distance maintained between self and robot), information foraging (e.g., as indexed by headset movement variability and eyetracking), or autonomic arousal (e.g., as indexed by shifts in pupil dilation or grip strength). Findings to date using minimally haptic VR confirm that participants treat the simulated active-shooter crisis seriously, and act in ways which validly mirror prior studies of real-world HRI under threat. We will describe these methods, including our manipulation of robot anthropomorphism and our current move to integrate full-body haptics to maximize both experiential immersion and incentives to avoid pain.

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