Socially-Aware Autonomous Doorway Traversal and Payload Delivery for Emergency Assistance

2026-07-06

AI Summary

This work addresses the critical challenge of enabling robots to efficiently perform door-opening and emergency supply delivery tasks during assisted evacuations without disrupting crowd flow. The authors propose a novel behavior tree–based system framework that, for the first time, integrates social awareness with multi-task decision-making in dynamic emergency scenarios. The robot can recognize ADA-compliant door buttons and rescue equipment, and adaptively modulate its behavior based on real-time crowd dynamics. Combining environment-triggered mechanisms, human-robot interaction perception, and task scheduling strategies, the framework is implemented on the Toyota Human Support Robot platform. Evaluated across 105 real-world and simulated trials, the system successfully completed 97 missions—including door operation, obstacle avoidance, coordinated passage, and supply delivery—demonstrating strong effectiveness, robustness, and scalability.

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.

Problem

• emergency evacuation
• doorway traversal
• payload delivery
• social awareness
• robotic assistance

Innovation

• behavior tree
• socially-aware navigation
• emergency assistance robotics
• doorway traversal
• payload delivery