URI engineering professor Haibo He has been awarded a three-year, $282,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a system of intelligent robots that can help direct or lead people to appropriate exits if an emergency evacuation is necessary.

He, a professor of electrical engineering, and a colleague at Stevens Institute of Technology were awarded the grant through President Barack Obama’s National Robotics Initiative, which called for the development of “co-robots” that can work alongside people to extend or augment human capabilities.

“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.”

He says stampeding crowds can be one of the most harmful collective human behaviors, often causing greater harm than the event that triggered the stampede. So his first step will be to study human behavior in emergencies, with the help of URI Psychology Professor Charles Collyer.

The next step will be to design mathematical algorithms to control how the robot will interact with humans. “Our ultimate goal is to control the robot, and in this way indirectly control human behavior,” says He.