04/04/2025
By Paul Robinette

What: Robotics Seminar – Professor Alan Wagner (Penn State) - Evacuation Robotics: Developing Robots that Guide and Rescue People
When: Tuesday, April 8, 2025 11 a.m.
Where: Dandeneau Hall, Room 321

Abstract:
How can we develop robots that guide people to safety during an emergency? This talk examines the challenges and opportunities associated with emergency evacuation as a paradigm for investigating human-robot interaction. We argue that emergency evacuation offers unique and important perspectives on human-robot interaction while also demanding close attention to the person’s emotional and cognitive states and the ethical ramifications of the technologies developed. We present a series of experiments exploring how people interact with robots during different types of emergencies ranging from fires to active shooting incidents. We present both methods for safely conducting studies that intentionally place people in stressful situations and the robotics technologies those studies have informed. We conclude with a discussion of the ethical implications of emergency evacuation robots and a roadmap for their development, implementation, and evaluation.

Bio:
Alan R. Wagner, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Aerospace Engineering and a Senior Research Associate for the Rock Ethics Institute at The Pennsylvania State University. He received his B.A. degree in Psychology from Northwestern University, his M.S. degree in Computer Science from Boston University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Penn State, he was a senior research scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology’s Research Institute and a member of the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Machines. Wagner’s research interests focus on human-machine trust, robot and machine ethics, and space robotics. He is the is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, Air Force Young Investigator Award, and has participated in the National Academy of Engineering’s US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. He has won several best paper awards, most recently receiving best journal article of 2018 award from the journal ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems for his work on human-machine trust.