Abstract
This paper presents a model for a mobile museum guide robot that can dynamically establish an appropriate spatial relationship with visitors during explanation of an exhibit. We began by observing and videotaping scenes of actual museum galleries where human guides explained exhibits to visitors. Based on the analysis of the video, we developed a mobile robot system able to guide multiple visitors inside the gallery from one exhibit to another. The robot has the capability to establish a type of spatial formation known as the “F-formation” at the beginning of its explanation after arriving near any exhibit, a feature aided by its ability to employ the “pause and restart” strategy at certain moments in its talk to draw the visitors' attention towards itself. The robot is also able to identify and invite any bystanders around itself into its ongoing explanation, thereby reconfiguring the F-formation. The system uses spatial information from a laser range sensor and the heads of visitors are tracked using three USB cameras. A particle filter framework is employed to track the visitors' positions and body orientation, and the orientations of their heads, based on position data and panorama images captured by the laser range sensor and the USB cameras, respectively. The effectiveness of our method was confirmed through experiments.
