Tour-guide Robot Research Articles

Design and Development of Line Following Tour Guide Robot

The aim of this research project is to develop a Tour Guide Robot showing sufficient intelligence to work as a tourguide in different environments. In doing so, both a software and a hardware architecture are proposed, the different modules of which, such as a sensor, speaker, amplifier, motor(dc), and display, among others, control the different components of the robot. Those components are in turn used by other modules designed for navigation and interaction. A sensor fusion for the purposes of localization is implemented by means of an Arduino Uno Board, which is one of the control module components, together with the other sensors needed for path following. A speaker and amplifier system that controls the voice modules also forms part of this architecture for assisting interaction. Finally, all the modules are controlled with an Arduino Uno Board and programming language. The modules are optimized for immediate execution to achieve navigation and human–machine interaction. The interaction with visitors will be achieve through video display on an android tablet placed on top of the robot. The tour guide robot will display the video about the place it visits when the visitors press the video play button on the android tablet screen.

Design and Implementation of Tour Guide Robot for Red Education Base

This article focuses on the development of red tourism and the construction of red education bases, and designs a tour guide robot that combines with the Internet of Things for guiding and promoting red education bases. The motion control part of this design is completed by STM32, and the control system adopts the ROS (Robot Operating System) framework, achieving functions such as map construction, path planning, navigation, obstacle avoidance, and voice guidance. The robot also implements the Internet of Things to improve human-machine interaction and user experience.

Retracted: Innovative Design of a Cloud Tour Guide Robot for Smart Cities under the Principle of System Innovation Design.

[This retracts the article DOI: 10.1155/2022/4971849.].

Innovative Design of a Cloud Tour Guide Robot for Smart Cities under the Principle of System Innovation Design.

In light of the ongoing occurrence of epidemics, the general populace frequently makes the decision to curtail their nomadic lifestyle in order to protect both their health and their safety. This has resulted in a number of issues, the most notable of which are the drop in the people's living happiness index and the poor business that the tourism industry has been experiencing as a result. Therefore, the idea of “cloud tourism” is undoubtedly the first candidate for the tourism industry, and in order to meet the requirements of cloud tourism, it is necessary to have an entirely new system to serve this, of which the scenic guide robot is an important part. At the same time, the quickening development of 5G technology offers solutions that may be put into practice for the multifurther IoT's expansion in smart cities. People will be able to experience the real outdoors without having to leave their homes, which will improve the people's well-being and alleviate the chilly status quo in the tourism industry. This is the plan, and it will be accomplished through the use of innovative guide robots that will make the experience more convenient and reliable.

Review of Autonomous Campus and Tour Guiding Robots with Navigation Techniques

ABSTRACT Autonomous robots are designed to support humans in diverse ways including companionship and assistance, as technology evolves, the burden of physical tasks which were performed by humans in the past are getting reduced. Autonomous guidance and navigation are popular fields that use mobile robots to replace humans. These robots are widely used in space, defence, education, and industry and require navigating safely through different environments. A significant aspect of Autonomous Robot Navigation is an obstacle and pedestrian avoidance. Most of the outdoor guiding robots follow the concept of SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) for moving from the initial point to the goal point. Moreover, image processing plays a vital role in the detection and recognition between humans and objects. The existing methodology comprises implementing autonomous tour guide robots are based in embedded systems which has a high degree of recognition accuracy. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the existing autonomous campus and tour guiding robots. This paper is steered at providing a satellite view of these existing assemblies and the advances made with them.

Emotion Detection for Social Robots Based on NLP Transformers and an Emotion Ontology.

For social robots, knowledge regarding human emotional states is an essential part of adapting their behavior or associating emotions to other entities. Robots gather the information from which emotion detection is processed via different media, such as text, speech, images, or videos. The multimedia content is then properly processed to recognize emotions/sentiments, for example, by analyzing faces and postures in images/videos based on machine learning techniques or by converting speech into text to perform emotion detection with natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Keeping this information in semantic repositories offers a wide range of possibilities for implementing smart applications. We propose a framework to allow social robots to detect emotions and to store this information in a semantic repository, based on EMONTO (an EMotion ONTOlogy), and in the first figure or table caption. Please define if appropriate. an ontology to represent emotions. As a proof-of-concept, we develop a first version of this framework focused on emotion detection in text, which can be obtained directly as text or by converting speech to text. We tested the implementation with a case study of tour-guide robots for museums that rely on a speech-to-text converter based on the Google Application Programming Interface (API) and a Python library, a neural network to label the emotions in texts based on NLP transformers, and EMONTO integrated with an ontology for museums; thus, it is possible to register the emotions that artworks produce in visitors. We evaluate the classification model, obtaining equivalent results compared with a state-of-the-art transformer-based model and with a clear roadmap for improvement.

Design and Simulation of Indoor Tour Guide Robot Based on ROS

Design and Simulation of Indoor Tour Guide Robot Based on ROS

Development of Tour-Guide and Co-Experience Robot System at a Theme Park using 5th Generation Mobile Communication System

Development of Tour-Guide and Co-Experience Robot System at a Theme Park using 5th Generation Mobile Communication System

A tour-guide robot: Moving towards interaction with humans

The aim of this research project is to develop a smart social robot showing sufficient intelligence to work as a tour-guide in different environments. In doing so, both a software and a hardware architecture are proposed, the different modules of which, such as a laser, cameras, platform, face, and voice, among others, control the different components of the robot. Those components are in turn used by other modules designed for navigation and interaction. A sensor fusion for the purposes of localization is implemented by means of an Extended Kalman Filter, which is one of the navigation module components, together with the proposed fuzzy controllers needed for path following. A fuzzy emotion system that controls the face and the voice modules also forms part of this architecture for assisting interaction. Finally, all the modules are controlled with a customized programming language that is a mixture of C, Pascal, and JavaScript. The modules are optimized for immediate execution to achieve realistic human–machine interaction.

Development of Tour-Guide Robot System at Theme Park using Quasi-Zenith Satellite System

Development of Tour-Guide Robot System at Theme Park using Quasi-Zenith Satellite System

Route learning and reproduction in a tour-guide robot

Traditionally, route information is introduced in tour-guide robots by experts in robotics. In the tour-guide robot that we are developing, we allow the robot to learn new routes while following an instructor. In this paper we describe the route recording process that takes place while following a human, as well as, how those routes are later reproduced.A key element of both route recording and reproduction is a robust multi-sensorial localization algorithm that we have designed, which is able to combine various sources of information to obtain an estimate of the robot’s pose. In this work we detail how the algorithm works, and how we use it to record routes. Moreover, we describe how our robot reproduces routes, including path planning within route points, and dynamic obstacle avoidance for safe navigation. Finally, we show through several trajectories how the robot was able to learn and reproduce different routes.

Gesture-based interaction with voice feedback for a tour-guide robot

Any service robot should possess some kind of human–robot interaction to communicate with users. In this paper we present a tour-guide robot able to recognize hand gestures and provide voice feedback. A user can communicate with the robot using hand movements, but also through virtual buttons which are shown in a augmented reality environment in the robot’s screen. Moreover, the user continuously receives feedback from the robot’s screen or by means of voice messages. The result is a robot that understands the users’ needs and which keeps them informed about what it senses, which increases the usefulness of our robot. Finally, to measure the quality in use, we have conducted two user studies, which we have used to reveal and correct the weakness of the robot. The guide robot was successfully tested in several real world environments.

이용자 측면의 이동형 관람 안내 로봇 개선

A mobile tour-guide robot is a very attractive tour-guide in the exhibition hall of science museums and the necessity of tour-guide robots for museums is gradually increasing. Two kinds of robots have served as tour-guide robots in an exhibition hall of the Korea National Science Museum which is a very densely populated museum of many people and exhibits. The robots move around the large exhibition area and provide guide services to lots of visitors. A robot leads the way to the exhibit that a visitor wants to find and it takes the shortest route. Robots were operated for four months from January to April 2011, and we observed behavior of visitors and collected subjective evaluation of users. The result shows that there are four stages of using a mobile tour-guide robot and some differences of subjective evaluations depending on the gender and the age of the user and we suggest several improvements on the mobile tour-guide robot.

Improving Web Learning through model Optimization using Bootstrap for a Tour-Guide Robot

We perform a review of Web Mining techniques and we describe a Bootstrap Statistics methodology applied to pattern model classifier optimization and verification for Supervised Learning for Tour-Guide Robot knowledge repository management. It is virtually impossible to test thoroughly Web Page Classifiers and many other Internet Applications with pure empirical data, due to the need for human intervention to generate training sets and test sets. We propose using the computer-based Bootstrap paradigm to design a test environment where they are checked with better reliability.

A framework for building mobile single and multi-robot applications

The complexity of robot software systems calls for the use of a well-conceived architecture together with programming tools to support it. One common feature of robot architectures is the modular decomposition of systems into simpler and largely independent components. These components implement primitive actions and report events about their state. The robot programming framework proposed here includes a tool (RoboGraph) to program and coordinate the activity (tasks) of these middleware modules. Project developers use the same task programming IDE (RoboGraph) on two different levels. The first is to program tasks that must be executed autonomously by one robot and the second is to program tasks that can include several robots and building elements. Tasks are described using a Signal Interpreted Petri Net (SIPN) editor and stored in an xml file. A dispatcher loads these files and executes the different Petri nets as needed. A monitor that shows the state of all the running nets is very useful for debugging and tracing purposes. The whole system has been used in several applications: A tour-guide robot (GuideBot), a multi-robot surveillance project (WatchBot) and a hospital food and laundry transportation system based on mobile robots.

Localization through omnivision for a tour-guide robot

The localization of a mobile robot in a real environment is a complex task. In this paper, an algorithm that solves the global localization is presented. The proposal is based on a merit function that ranks different possible poses obtained from the acquired image, together with an iterative process for the minimization of that function using a particle filter. Landmark detection has been done with an omnidirectional camera pointing to the ceiling, combined with an infrared passband filter which extracts the lights. Several real experiments, both for global localization and the kidnapped robot problem, have been done in a museum. Results show a high accuracy, robustness, and real-time execution in this complex and crowded environment.

Bayesian networks based multi-modality fusion for error handling in human–robot dialogues under noisy conditions

In this paper, we introduce probabilistic model based architecture for error handling in human–robot spoken dialogue systems under adverse audio conditions. In this architecture, a Bayesian network framework is used for interpretation of multi-modal signals in the spoken dialogue between a tour-guide robot and visitors in mass exhibition conditions. In particular, we report on experiments interpreting speech and laser scanner signals in the dialogue management system of the autonomous tour-guide robot RoboX, successfully deployed at the Swiss National Exhibition (Expo.02). A correct interpretation of a user’s (visitor’s) goal or intention at each dialogue state is a key issue for successful voice-enabled communication between tour-guide robots and visitors. To infer the visitors’ goal under the uncertainty intrinsic to these two modalities, we introduce Bayesian networks for combining noisy speech recognition with data from a laser scanner, which are independent of acoustic noise. Experiments with real-world data, collected during the operation of RoboX at Expo.02 demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in adverse environment. The proposed architecture makes it possible to model error-handling processes in spoken dialogue systems, which include complex combination of different multi-modal information sources in cases where such information is available.

On developing a voice-enabled interface for interactive tour-guide robots

This paper considers design methodologies in order to develop voice-enabled interfaces for tour-guide robots deployed at the Robotics Exposition of the Swiss National Exhibition (Expo.02). Human-robot voice communication presents new challenges for design of fully autonomous mobile robots, in that interactivity must be robot-initiated in conversation and within a dynamic adverse environment. We approached these general problems for a voice-enabled interface, tailored to limited computational resources of one on-board processor, when integrating smart speech signal acquisition, automatic speech recognition and synthesis, as well as a dialogue system into the multi-modal, multi-sensor interface for the expo tour-guide robot. We also focus on particular issues that needed to be addressed in voice-based interaction when planning specific tasks and research experiments for Expo.02, where tour-guide robots had to interact with hundreds of thousands of visitors over 6 months, 7 days a week, 10 h per day.

Structured Reactive Controllers

Service robots, such as autonomous office couriers or robot tourguides, must be both reliable and efficient. This requires them to flexibly interleave their tasks, exploit opportunities, quickly plan their course of action, and, if necessary, revise their intended activities. In this paper, we show how structured reactive controllers (SRCs) satisfy these requirements. The novel feature of SRCs is that they employ and reason about plans that specify and synchronize concurrent percept-driven behavior. Powerful control abstractions enable SRCs to integrate physical action, perception, planning, and communication in a uniform framework and to apply fast but imperfect computational methods without sacrificing reliability and flexibility. Concurrent plans are represented in a transparent and modular form so that automatic planning processes can reason about the plans and revise them. We present experiments in which SRCs are used to control two autonomous mobile robots. In one of them an SRC controlled the course of action of a museum tourguide robot that has operated for thirteen days, more than ninetyfour hours, completed 620 tours, and presented 2668 exhibits.

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.