The Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot
Abstract
This paper describes the software architecture of an autonomous tour-guide/tutor robot. This robot was recently deployed in the "Deutsches Museum Bonn," where 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.
Outstanding paper award
BibTeX
@conference{Burgard-1998-16578,author = {W. Burgard and A. B. Cremers and Dieter Fox and D. Hahnel and G. Lakemeyer and D. Schulz and W. Steiner and Sebastian Thrun},
title = {The Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 15th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI '98)},
year = {1998},
month = {July},
pages = {11 - 18},
}