TY - JOUR
T1 - Distributed multi-robot evacuation incorporating human behavior
AU - Zhang, Shubo
AU - Guo, Yi
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Chinese Automatic Control Society and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd.
PY - 2015/1/1
Y1 - 2015/1/1
N2 - It is well known that trained leaders have an important influence on saving human lives in emergency evacuation. In this paper, we present a novel distributed multi-robot system for guiding people in an emergency evacuation mission. A cooperative exit-seeking algorithm is designed for the robots to guide evacuees by online estimating the gradient and tracing gradient-descent while maintaining a predefined formation in movement. To better deal with evacuees' behaviors in emergency situations, two human panic behavior models are taken into account in the evacuation strategies. Guidance algorithms of single robot team and multi-team are introduced in the evacuation system. We evaluate the proposed method through comparing evacuation time with non-robot-assisted procedures in the static and dynamic routing simulations. The results show that our method can significantly shorten the evacuation time.
AB - It is well known that trained leaders have an important influence on saving human lives in emergency evacuation. In this paper, we present a novel distributed multi-robot system for guiding people in an emergency evacuation mission. A cooperative exit-seeking algorithm is designed for the robots to guide evacuees by online estimating the gradient and tracing gradient-descent while maintaining a predefined formation in movement. To better deal with evacuees' behaviors in emergency situations, two human panic behavior models are taken into account in the evacuation strategies. Guidance algorithms of single robot team and multi-team are introduced in the evacuation system. We evaluate the proposed method through comparing evacuation time with non-robot-assisted procedures in the static and dynamic routing simulations. The results show that our method can significantly shorten the evacuation time.
KW - Evacuation
KW - Human and robot interaction
KW - Multi-robot systems
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U2 - 10.1002/asjc.1047
DO - 10.1002/asjc.1047
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84925354140
SN - 1561-8625
VL - 17
SP - 34
EP - 44
JO - Asian Journal of Control
JF - Asian Journal of Control
IS - 1
ER -