Aiding Emergency Evacuations Using Obstacle-Aware Path Clearing

We seek to develop robots capable of helping people evacuate. Some evacuation environments, however, may have obstacles blocking the person's path to the closest exit. This paper therefore explores the possibility of creating robots that detect and move obstacles in order to open evacuation pathways. Experiments were conducted using a simulated autonomous robot in photorealistic indoor environments. The system uses computer vision algorithms to gather information from the environment. We show that the gathered information can be used to decide whether an obstacle can or needs to be moved in order to open a new evacuation pathway. We then use simple push manipulations to successfully remove obstacles from a path. We show that the system decreases evacuation time for evacuees in simulations of indoor environments.