Trust in Emergency Evacuation Robots

©2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Presented at the 10th IEEE International Symposium on Safety Security and Rescue Robotics (SSRR 2012), College Station, TX, Nov. 2012.DOI: 10.1109/SSRR.2012.6523903Would you trust a robot to lead you to safety in an emergency? What design would best attract your attention in a smoke-filled environment? How should the robot behave to best increase your trust? To answer these questions, we have created a three dimensional environment to simulate an emergency and determine to what degree an individual will follow a robot to a variety of exits. Survey feedback and quantitative scenario results were gathered on two different robot designs. Fifteen volunteers completed a total of seven scenarios each: one without a robot and one with each robot pointing to each of three exits in the environment. Robots were followed by each volunteer in at least two scenarios. One-third of all volunteers followed the robot in each robot-guided scenario