🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses a critical gap in robotic evacuation strategies, which typically prioritize obstacle avoidance and macroscopic crowd flow while neglecting environmental affordances and human spatial expectations, thereby compromising both passive safety and psychological comfort. Through virtual reality evacuation experiments integrating behavioral psychology assessments and four multi-robot yielding strategies—Hide, LineEscape, Freeze, and ShortestPath—the research reveals for the first time the pivotal role of environmental semantics (e.g., refuge alcoves) in shaping human cognitive expectations. Findings demonstrate that actively leveraging spatial structures significantly enhances psychological comfort, that violations of expectation incur measurable cognitive costs, and that strategy preference follows Hide > LineEscape > Freeze > ShortestPath, confirming that proactive yielding outperforms freezing or efficiency-driven approaches. Moreover, prior human–robot interaction experience facilitates comprehension of complex social intentions.
📝 Abstract
As mobile service robots increasingly coexist with pedestrians, ensuring passively safe behaviour during confined emergency evacuations is critical. Existing multi-robot yielding strategies often focus solely on collision avoidance and macroscopic flow optimisation, overlooking environmental affordances and human spatial expectations. To bridge the gap between macroscopic theory and micro-level perception, we conducted a game-based virtual evacuation experiment (N=56). We investigated individual psychological responses to four multi-robot yielding strategies (Hide, LineEscape, Freeze, ShortestPath) across confined corridors with and without refuge niches. Our results establish a robust preference hierarchy (Hide>LineEscape>Freeze>ShortestPath), demonstrating that proactive space-yielding significantly outperforms freezing and efficiency-first approaches. Crucially, we found that environmental affordances heavily shape cognitive expectations. Actively utilising available niches amplifies the psychological comfort of proactive yielding (Hide). Conversely, failing to use an obvious niche (e.g., executing LineEscape) may trigger Expectation Violation. This is reflected in a drastically increased perceived cognitive delay, despite objectively unimpeded trajectories. Furthermore, prior robot interaction experience helps users decode complex social intents. Ultimately, this research demonstrates that safe human-robot interaction during emergencies must evolve from pure trajectory optimisation to semantically aware navigation. Future work will extend this framework to investigate complex interactions between robot swarms and pedestrian crowds.