Experiences with an interactive museum tour-guide robot

This article describes the software architecture of an autonomous, interact ive tour-guide robot. It presents a modular and distributed software archit ecture, which integrates localization, mapping, collision avoidance, planni ng, and various modules concerned with user interaction and Web-based telep resence. At its heart, the software approach relies on probabilistic comput ation, on-line learning, and any-time algorithms. It enables robots to oper ate safely, reliably, and at high speeds in highly dynamic environments, an d does not require any modifications of the environment to aid the robot's operation. Special emphasis is placed on the design of interactive capabili ties that appeal to people's intuition. The interface provides new means fo r human-robot interaction with crowds of people in public places, and it al so provides people all around the world with the ability to establish a "vi rtual telepresence" using the Web, To illustrate our approach, results are reported obtained in mid-1997, when our robot "RHINO" was deployed for a pe riod of six days in a densely populated museum. The empirical results demon strate reliable operation in public environments. The robot successfully ra ised the museum's attendance by more than 50%. In addition, thousands of pe ople all over the world controlled the robot through the Web. We conjecture that these innovations transcend to a much larger range of application dom ains for service robots. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved .