An affective mobile robot educator with a full-time job

Abstract

Sage is a robot that has been installed at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History as a full-time autonomous member of the staff. Its goal is to provide educational content to museum visitors in order to augment their museum experience. This paper discusses all aspects of the related research and development. The functional obstacle avoidance system, which departs from the conventional occupancy grid-based approaches, is described. Sage's topological navigation system, using only color vision and odometric information, is also described. Long-term statistics provide a quantitative measure of performance over a nine month trial period. The process by which Sage's educational content and personality were created and evaluated in collaboration with the museum's Divisions of Education and Exhibits is explained. Finally, the ability of Sage to conduct automatic long-term parameter adjustment is presented.

Fritz - A Humanoid Communication Robot

“…Their aim was to enhance the robot's believability during navigation in order to achieve the intended goals. Similarly, Nourbakhsh et al [11] designed a fuzzy state machine with five moods for a robotic tourguide. Transitions in this state machine occur depending on external events, such as people standing in the robot's way.…”

Robox at Expo.02: A large-scale installation of personal robots

“…A limited number of researchers have addressed the challenge of navigation in exhibitionlike environments such as museums [7,13,19,24,26]. Rhino [7] and Minerva [24] were both successfully deployed in a museum during 1 or 2 weeks, respectively.…”

“…Unlike these short-term projects, the autonomous tour-guide robot Sage was in action permanently in a museum with a total of more than half a year of successful operation [19,26]. For localization, the environment was substantially modified by adding artificial landmarks (color patches).…”

“…In former exhibition projects, localization was based on off-board hardware [7,24] or environment modifications [19]. In our earlier work we employed features and an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) [4].…”

The mobot museum robot installations: a five year experiment

“…In January 1998, we and others began work on Chips, an autonomous robot intended to be more than a short experiment. Our goal would be to install Chips as a permanent member of the museum staff at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania [1].…”