Multi-Robot-Guided Crowd Evacuation: Two-Scale Modeling and Control Based on Mean-Field Hydrodynamic Models

02/28/2023
by   Tongjia Zheng, et al.
0

Emergency evacuation describes a complex situation involving time-critical decision-making by evacuees. Mobile robots are being actively explored as a potential solution to provide timely guidance. In this work, we study a robot-guided crowd evacuation problem where a small group of robots is used to guide a large human crowd to safe locations. The challenge lies in how to utilize micro-level human-robot interactions to indirectly influence a population that significantly outnumbers the robots to achieve the collective evacuation objective. To address the challenge, we follow a two-scale modeling strategy and explore mean-field hydrodynamic models which consist of a family of microscopic social-force models that explicitly describe how human movements are locally affected by other humans, the environment, and the robots, and associated macroscopic equations for the temporal and spatial evolution of the crowd density and flow velocity. We design controllers for the robots such that they not only automatically explore the environment (with unknown dynamic obstacles) to cover it as much as possible but also dynamically adjust the directions of their local navigation force fields based on the real-time macro-states of the crowd to guide the crowd to a safe location. We prove the stability of the proposed evacuation algorithm and conduct a series of simulations (involving unknown dynamic obstacles) to validate the performance of the algorithm.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 10

research
09/20/2022

Multi-Robot-Assisted Human Crowd Evacuation using Navigation Velocity Fields

This work studies a robot-assisted crowd evacuation problem where we con...
research
06/01/2022

Dense Crowd Flow-Informed Path Planning

Both pedestrian and robot comfort are of the highest priority whenever a...
research
09/17/2021

What we see and What we don't see: Imputing Occluded Crowd Structures from Robot Sensing

We consider the navigation of mobile robots in crowded environments, for...
research
06/30/2023

Learning Evacuee Models from Robot-Guided Emergency Evacuation Experiments

Recent research has examined the possibility of using robots to guide ev...
research
06/13/2020

Decentralized decision making and navigation strategy for tracking intruders in a cluttered area by a group of mobile robots

In the current era of the industrial revolution, mobile robots are playi...
research
08/20/2020

Autonomous Social Distancing in Urban Environments using a Quadruped Robot

COVID-19 pandemic has become a global challenge faced by people all over...
research
02/23/2022

Evacuation trials from a double-deck electric train unit: Experimental data and sensitivity analysis

Passenger trains represent a challenging environment in emergencies, wit...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset