Abstract
GidaBot is an application designed to setup and run a heterogeneous team of robots to act as tour guides in multi-floor buildings. Although the tours can go through several floors, the robots can only service a single floor, and thus, a guiding task may require collaboration among several robots. The designed system makes use of a robust inter-robot communication strategy to share goals and paths during the guiding tasks. Such tours work as personal services carried out by one or more robots. In this paper, a face re-identification/verification module based on state-of-the-art techniques is developed, evaluated offline, and integrated into GidaBot’s real daily activities, to avoid new visitors interfering with those attended. It is a complex problem because, as users are casual visitors, no long-term information is stored, and consequently, faces are unknown in the training step. Initially, re-identification and verification are evaluated offline considering different face detectors and computing distances in a face embedding representation. To fulfil the goal online, several face detectors are fused in parallel to avoid face alignment bias produced by face detectors under certain circumstances, and the decision is made based on a minimum distance criterion. This fused approach outperforms any individual method and highly improves the real system’s reliability, as the tests carried out using real robots at the Faculty of Informatics in San Sebastian show.
Highlights
According to the International Federation of Robotics, service robots aim to assist humans in performing useful tasks and can be categorized according to the type of interaction they are able to demonstrate [1]
The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the relevant literature about tour guide robots, on the one hand, and about face recognition in social service robots, on the other
As far as we know, no face recognition approach as the one proposed here has been included in social service robots navigating in dynamic environments
Summary
According to the International Federation of Robotics, service robots aim to assist humans in performing useful tasks and can be categorized according to the type of interaction they are able to demonstrate [1]. We present a step forward, integrating a face recognition module into GidaBot, which allows each robot to identify the user that demanded the tour. The novelty relies in the adoption of a minimal distance approach in the face embedding representation space, which reduces the dependency of each single face detector strength and weakness Both the interaction protocol and the fusion approach are validated in the real tour guide system using three robots with different morphologies and moving on different floors of a building. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the relevant literature about tour guide robots, on the one hand, and about face recognition in social service robots, on the other. In the last section, conclusions are described and challenges outlined
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