Distributed multi-robot evacuation incorporating human behavior

When a disaster happens, evacuation in a building can be dangerous. It is well known that trained leaders have an important influence on saving human lives in emergency evacuation. In this paper, we present a novel distributed multi-robot system for guiding people in an emergency evacuation mission. A closed environment, which is represented by the means of Laplacian Artificial Potential Field (LAPF), is considered in the emergency evacuation scenario. A cooperative exit seeking algorithms is designed for the robots to guide evacuees by online estimating the gradient and tracing gradient-descend while maintaining a predefined formation in movement. To better deal with evacuees´ behavior in emergency situations, a human panic behavior model is taken into account to the evacuation strategies. Simulations of a single robot team and multi-team are shown to demonstrate our methods for evacuation guidance.