The Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot

W. Burgard, A.B. Cremers, D. Fox, D. Hähnel, G. Lakemeyer, D. Schulz, W. Steiner, and S. Thrun

In Proc. of the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 1998

This paper describes the software architecture of an autonomous tour-guide/tutor robot. This robot was recently deployed in the ``Deutsches Museum Bonn,'' were it guided hundreds of visitors through the museum during a six-day deployment period. The robot's control software integrates low-level probabilistic reasoning with high-level problem solving embedded in first order logic. A collection of software innovations, described in this paper, enabled the robot to navigate at high speeds through dense crowds, while reliably avoiding collisions with obstacles---some of which could not even be sensed. Also described in this paper is a user interface tailored towards non-expert users, which we believe was essential for the robot's success in the museum. Based on these results, this paper argues that time is ripe for the development of AI-based commercial service robots that assist people in everyday life.
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