GuideBot. A Tour Guide System Based on Mobile Robots

Abstract

There is a growing interest in the use of tour guide mobile robots in different environments such as museums, exhibitions and fairs. This type of robot should have autonomy, robust perception and navigation systems, and should also be oriented towards close interaction with humans. In this paper we present an automatic tour guide system based on a set of mobile platforms that interact with visitors to help them in different tasks. These tasks include giving tours to visitors, helping them find points of interest in a building and providing information about elements in the stands in a fair. Over the last few years, many tour guide robots have been developed and used in museums and at events. Most of these systems are based on a single robot and they do not include mechanisms to exchange information with the building automation system. The approach presented here uses several robots connected to a central server. The system also includes different devices in the building that are connected through a fieldbus to the central server. The system was developed with the Robotics Integrated Development Environment (RIDE) and was tested intensively at different events.

Implementing Autonomous Driving Behaviors Using a Message Driven Petri Net Framework

“…The programming environment, named RoboGraph, allows the edition, execution, tracing, and maintenance of the PNs that implement the behaviors needed for different traffic scenarios. RG has been used before within the RIDE framework [44] for several multirobot applications, such as on the hotel assistant BellBot [55], the surveillance system WatchBot [56], and a tour guide system GuideBot [57]. For the work presented in this paper, the RG inter-process communication mechanism has been extended to communicate with ROS modules.…”

Personal Guides: Heterogeneous Robots Sharing Personal Tours in Multi-Floor Environments

“…The elevator was located on the map, and the robot used its manipulators inside it. A similar work extended to multiple robots was proposed for the GuideBot tour guide [22] and BellBot hotel assistant [23] systems. The two systems made use of the elevators to navigate between floors.…”