This paper discusses the application of robotic technologies to an evacuation assistance task. We describe how this kind of task diers from the more prevalent search and rescue eorts, and how this dierence aects the approach taken in building systems focused on the evacuation phase. The paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a deployment algorithm intended to distribute audio navigational cues throughout an oce building environment. A review of evacuation dynamics methods is presented and particular methods are used within the deployment algorithm in an on-line sense. We use a pedestrian simulation and a simple model of audio-evacuee interaction in order to show the eects of beacon deployment; this indicates that even a very few beacons can result in a large decrease in the mean and variance of egress distance (and time). We also advance possible uses for human motion based methods of environment evaluation more broadly for mobile robotics in general.
['Dylan A. Shell', 'Maja J. Matarić']
Insights Toward Robot-Assisted Evacuation