Socially-Aware Autonomous Doorway Traversal and Payload Delivery for Emergency Assistance
2026-07-06 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors worked on a robot that helps during emergency evacuations by opening doors and delivering rescue equipment. Their system uses a behavior tree to decide what the robot should do based on what it senses around it, like when to press door buttons or avoid getting in people's way. They tested the robot in many trials with both real and simulated setups and it succeeded most of the time. This shows their approach could help robots assist better in emergency situations.
robot-assisted evacuationbehavior treedoor button detectionrescue equipment retrievalhuman-robot interactionToyota Human Support Robotemergency response roboticstask selectionrobot navigation
Authors
Andrew Snowdy, Ananya Trivedi, Sarvesh Prajapati, Lorena Maria Genua, Taskin Padir
Abstract
In this work, we focus on the scenario of a robot-assisted emergency evacuation. We consider two capabilities relevant to such a setting. The first is opening doors ahead of the people being evacuated, so that their path toward an exit stays clear. The second is retrieving rescue equipment and delivering it to the emergency responders carrying out the evacuation. From a systems perspective, this involves several tasks at once. The robot must locate ADA-compliant door buttons and the rescue equipment it needs to retrieve. Additionally, it must remain aware of the people around it and adapt its behavior to them, so that it supports the evacuation rather than getting in the way. We address these demands with a behavior tree at the core of our framework. This structure is chosen for its ability to select high-level tasks based on environmental triggers, and to extend to new situations as they arise. We evaluate the system in 105 trials on the Toyota Human Support Robot, across five hardware and three simulation scenarios. These trials capture the decisions the robot must make in this setting: whether to press a door button, yield to a nearby person, walk through a door someone else is holding, or first retrieve rescue equipment before traversing the door. Overall, the system completes 97 of the 105 trials successfully. These results suggest our framework provides a practical basis for robotic assistance in broader emergency response tasks. Code and video demonstrations are available at https://github.com/AndrewSnowdy/hsr_mm_control.