Paper ID: 2210.08414

Using Virtual Reality to Simulate Human-Robot Emergency Evacuation Scenarios

Alan R. Wagner, Colin Holbrook, Daniel Holman, Brett Sheeran, Vidullan Surendran, Jared Armagost, Savanna Spazak, Yinxuan Yin

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.

Submitted: Oct 16, 2022