Characterizing Evacuee Behavior During a Robot-Guided Evacuation.

This research explores evacuee responses to robot-guided evacuation. During the conduct of a human-robot experiment we trigger a smoke alarm on unsuspecting subjects. The robot offers to led the subjects to a distant, less familiar exit. We capture the subjects decision to follow, evacuation characteristics, and impressions of the robot over individual and group conditions and two different approaches to designing evacuation robots. We ran a total of 112 subjects across various conditions and find that, overall, 95.28% of participants followed the robot's guidance. We further show that, although the amount of time evacuees wait prior to evacuating does not differ between the conditions, the total evacuation time is less when a multi-robot approach is taken. We also present a series of preliminary results on related exploratory studies.