Robot Guided Crowd Evacuation

Abstract

The congregation of crowd undoubtedly constitutes an important risk factor, which may endanger the safety of the gathered people. The solution reported against this significant threat to citizens safety is to consider careful planning and measures. Thereupon, in this paper, we address the crowd evacuation problem by suggesting an innovative technological solution, namely, the use of mobile robot agents. The contribution of the proposed evacuation system is twofold: (i) it proposes an accurate Cellular Automaton simulation model capable of assessing the human behavior during emergency situations and (ii) it takes advantage of the simulation output to provide sufficient information to the mobile robotic guide, which in turn approaches and redirects a group of people towards a less congestive exit at a time. A custom-made mobile robotic platform was accordingly designed and developed. Last, the performance of the proposed robot guided evacuation model has been examined in real-world scenarios exhibiting significant performance improvement during the crucial first response time window.