Multi-robot-assisted human crowd control for emergency evacuation: A stabilization approach

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of controlling a group of mobile robots to drive a group of humans to an exit for emergency evacuation. The interactions between the robots and the humans are modeled by a social force model. A novel optimization problem is formulated to synthesize a controller with closed-form expression. Sufficient conditions for global asymptotic stability are established for the humans and the robots. A simulation is conducted to evaluate the proposed controller.