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.
@article{arxiv.2210.08414,
title = {Using Virtual Reality to Simulate Human-Robot Emergency Evacuation Scenarios},
author = {Alan R. Wagner and Colin Holbrook and Daniel Holman and Brett Sheeran and Vidullan Surendran and Jared Armagost and Savanna Spazak and Yinxuan Yin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.08414},
year = {2022}
}