URI prof receives $282K grant to design robots to evacuate people

URI PROFESSOR OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING Haibo He believes that robots can be developed that would help reduce negative reactions to panic situations that often cause more harm through stampedes than do the original circumstances that cause the panic. / PBN FILE PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
URI PROFESSOR OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING Haibo He believes that robots can be developed that would help reduce negative reactions to panic situations that often cause more harm through stampedes than do the original circumstances that cause the panic. / PBN FILE PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

SOUTH KINGSTOWN – University of Rhode Island electrical engineering professor Haibo He is part of a team that has been awarded a $282,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop robots that could help direct people to emergency exits in the case of an emergency.
“Our goal is to help evacuate people from malls, student dormitories, auditoriums or other indoor environments where an emergency has happened, like a fire,” He said. “We want to design an intelligent robot with control algorithms to guide people under those situations.”
According to He, stampeding crowds in emergency situations often cause greater harm than the event that caused the panicked exit to take place.
The team, which includes Stevens Institute of Technology associate professor Yi Guo, received the grant as part of President Barack Obama’s National Robotics Initiative to develop robots that can work with people to improve human potential. His specialty, adaptive dynamic programming, which develops mathematical algorithms that can mimic human behavior as well as adapt to changing condition, gained He a 2011 Providence Business News Innovation Award.
The award follows an NSF grant in January for $850,000 to develop sensors and computer architecture for “smart cites.” He was part of a three-person team at URI that received the grant, which is looking to develop systems that “would immediately point out where [a fire] is and quickly evaluate its severity to determine how best to respond,” according to co-recipient Tao Wei, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at URI.
The concept for the most recent grant is to create a system of multiple robots in a venue that could be deployed in the case of an emergency, and using sensors, direct people to the best escape route, taking into account previous behavior, as well as the changing dynamics at the scene.
In addition to his co-recipient, He expects to use URI psychology professor Charles Collyer to help better understand how people react in panic situations, as well as local community college and high school students to help understand how to control robot action in the proscribed situations.

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