Using Virtual Reality to Simulate Human-Robot Emergency Evacuation Scenarios
This work addresses the difficulty of conducting physical emergency evacuation experiments for human-robot interaction, though it appears incremental as it builds on prior findings about robot guidance.
The paper tackles the challenge of simulating emergency evacuation scenarios where a robot guides a person, using virtual reality to enable cost-effective and varied experiments while aiming to elicit genuine human reactions.
This paper describes our recent effort to use virtual reality to simulate threatening emergency evacuation scenarios in which a robot guides a person to an exit. Our prior work has demonstrated that people will follow a robot's guidance, even when the robot is faulty, during an emergency evacuation. Yet, because physical in-person emergency evacuation experiments are difficult and costly to conduct and because we would like to evaluate many different factors, we are motivated to develop a system that immerses people in the simulation environment to encourage genuine subject reactions. We are working to complete experiments verifying the validity of our approach.