Alan Richard Wagner, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor Minghui Zhu, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor Madhavan Swaminathan, Program Head/Chair Bin Li, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Virtual Reality (VR) is a promising testbed for convincing, easy-to-control, and risk-mitigating robot-guided emergency evacuation experiments compared to physical experiments. Yet, it is still unclear whether human behavior elicited in a VR experiment accurately reflects how a person would act in a real environment. The current study replicates in VR a prior study conducted in a real environment. Human behaviors (such as compliance towards the robot’s instructions and evacuation time) during evacuation were compared in the two environments. A total of 25 human subjects participated in a VR experiment which involved a robot-guided evacuation under a fire emergency. The evacuation behaviors observed in VR were reasonably aligned with corresponding elements in the physical study. The results stand as evidence that robot-guided emergency evacuation experiments conducted in VR are external valid.
