Evacuation support system to control emotional level of crowd: simulation-based evaluation under various scales and ratios of guide robots for evacuees

Abstract

In recent years, the development of efficient and effective evacuation information systems has attracted considerable attention, because people have been affected by various large-scale disasters such as typhoons, cyclones, floods, and tsunamis all over the world. Even in conventional evacuation information systems, necessary information can be given to the evacuees in advance. Nevertheless, it has been reported that many of the victims died without escaping. The cause is not the lack of information but the psychological properties of humans. This phenomenon is called majority syncing bias. In general, we tend to sympathize with the emotions of others in a crowd, and this prevents evacuation. In our previous works, we proposed a framework for controlling the emotional level of a crowd by employing robots. In this paper, to confirm the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we conducted additional simulations under various scales and ratios of guide robots for evacuees.