Robots have the potential to assist in emergency evacuation tasks, but it is not clear how robots should behave to evacuate people who are not fully compliant, perhaps due to panic or other priorities in an emergency. In this paper, we compare two robot strategies: an actively nudging robot that initiates evacuation and pulls toward the exit and a passively waiting robot that stays around users and waits for instruction. Both strategies were automatically synthesized from a description of the desired behavior. We conduct a within participant study ( = 20) in a simulated environment to compare the evacuation effectiveness between the two robot strategies. Our results indicate an advantage of the nudging robot for effective evacuation when being exposed to the evacuation scenario for the first time. The waiting robot results in lower efficiency, higher mental load, and more physical conflicts. However, participants like the waiting robots equally or slightly more when they repeat the evacuation scenario and are more familiar with the situation. Our qualitative analysis of the participants' feedback suggests several design implications for future emergency evacuation robots.

IEUM, a small data cube, is a fundamental agent of transportation envisioned in a future shared mobility system. By communicating with the user, IEUM understands what its user needs at the moment and acts as a mediating agent among humans, cars, and other traffic infrastructures. While taking you to your personalized route of the day, IEUM will also enhance the traffic and energy efficiency of our transportation systems with other IEUMs out on the road. With your buddy IEUM, moving is full of fun.

This paper describes the system development of an admittance-controlled 2-dof haptic device using electrostatic motors. The unique point of the device is that all components including the motors and sensors are fabricated using non ferromagnetic materials to realize operation in a strong magnetic field. The device consists of an operation handle, two electrostatic motor units and two optical force sensors, and is an improved version of our previous development. The new device has stiffer platforms, improved force sensors, and newly fabricated driving electronics. The employed electrostatic motor is one of the strongest electrostatic actuators and can generate thrust force of several newtons. To operate a motor unit, two three-phase signals are required and they have to be amplified to over 1 kV. In our previous development, the signals were amplified by six large commercial amplifiers, which was not practical enough considering the portability of the system. This work developed an original driving electronics for the motor using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and step-up transformers to reduce the system size. The device was implemented on one of the major haptic toolkits, CHAI 3D. To be able to run sample impedance-type programs without any modifications, we implemented our device to behave like impedance-type on CHAI 3D.