Experiences with an interactive museum tour-guide robot

This article describes the software architecture of an autonomous, interactive tour-guide robot. It presents a modular and distributed software architecture, which integrates localization, mapping, collision avoidance, planning, and various modules concerned with user interaction and Web-based telepresence. At its heart, the software approach relies on probabilistic computation, on-line learning, and any-time algorithms. It enables robots to operate safely, reliably, and at high speeds in highly dynamic environments, and does not require any modifications of the environment to aid the robot's operation. Special emphasis is placed on the design of interactive capabilities that appeal to people's intuition. The interface provides new means for human-robot interaction with crowds of people in public places, and it also provides people all around the world with the ability to establish a “virtual telepresence” using the Web. To illustrate our approach, results are reported obtained in mid-1997, when our robot “RHINO” was deployed for a period of six days in a densely populated museum. The empirical results demonstrate reliable operation in public environments. The robot successfully raised the museum's attendance by more than 50%. In addition, thousands of people all over the world controlled the robot through the Web. We conjecture that these innovations transcend to a much larger range of application domains for service robots.