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There has been a plethora of work towards improving robot perception and navigation, yet their application in hazardous environments, like during a fire or an earthquake, is still at a nascent stage. We hypothesize two key challenges here:…
Density of the reachable states can help understand the risk of safety-critical systems, especially in situations when worst-case reachability is too conservative. Recent work provides a data-driven approach to compute the density…
Teaching autonomous mobile robots to successfully navigate human crowds is a challenging task. Not only does it require planning, but it requires maintaining social norms which may differ from one context to another. Here we focus on crowd…
Emergency Response Management (ERM) is a critical problem faced by communities across the globe. Despite this, it is common for ERM systems to follow myopic decision policies in the real world. Principled approaches to aid ERM…
In the last fifty years, researchers have developed statistical, data-driven, analytical, and algorithmic approaches for designing and improving emergency response management (ERM) systems. The problem has been noted as inherently difficult…
The emerging technology enabling autonomy in vehicles has led to a variety of new problems in transportation networks, such as planning and perception for autonomous vehicles. Other works consider social objectives such as decreasing fuel…
This paper proposes a path planning algorithm for multi-agent unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) to autonomously cover a search area, while considering obstacle avoidance, as well as the capabilities and energy consumption of the employed…
Conventional simulations on multi-exit indoor evacuation focus primarily on how to determine a reasonable exit based on numerous factors in a changing environment. Results commonly include some congested and other under-utilized exits,…
This article introduces a modeling framework to characterize evacuee response to environmental stimuli during emergency egress. The model is developed in consistency with stress theory, which explains how an organism reacts to environmental…
Mobile robotic platforms are an indispensable tool for various scientific and industrial applications. Robots are used to undertake missions whose execution is constrained by various factors, such as the allocated time or their remaining…
Understanding the spatiotemporal road network accessibility during a hurricane evacuation, the level of ease of residents in an area in reaching evacuation destination sites through the road network, is a critical component of emergency…
We consider the line planning problem in public transportation, under a robustness perspective. We present a mechanism for robust line planning in the case of multiple line pools, when the line operators have a different utility function…
Currently there are many attempts around the world to use computers, smartphones, tablets and other electronic devices in order to stop the spread of COVID-19. Most of these attempts focus on collecting information about infected people, in…
Vehicle mobility optimization in urban areas is a long-standing problem in smart city and spatial data analysis. Given the complex urban scenario and unpredictable social events, our work focuses on developing a mobile sequential…
Indoor venues accommodate many people who collectively form crowds. Such crowds in turn influence people's routing choices, e.g., people may prefer to avoid crowded rooms when walking from A to B. This paper studies two types of crowd-aware…
Deploying a safe mobile robot policy in scenarios with human pedestrians is challenging due to their unpredictable movements. Current Reinforcement Learning-based motion planners rely on a single policy to simulate pedestrian movements and…
In disaster response or surveillance operations, quickly identifying areas needing urgent attention is critical, but deploying response teams to every location is inefficient or often impossible. Effective performance in this domain…
This paper aims to put forward the concept that learning to take safe actions in unknown environments, even with probability one guarantees, can be achieved without the need for an unbounded number of exploratory trials, provided that one…
Understanding the collective dynamics of crowd movements during stressful emergency situations is central to reducing the risk of deadly crowd disasters. Yet, their systematic experimental study remains a challenging open problem due to…
Motion planning in uncertain environments like complex urban areas is a key challenge for autonomous vehicles (AVs). The aim of our research is to investigate how AVs can navigate crowded, unpredictable scenarios with multiple pedestrians…