A Robot Tour Guide

The aim of this project is to create a robot that can act as a tour guide, for example, in a museum, or to show visitors around the CSE building. One of the most difficult problems is to create a map for the robot to use. An example of such a map is show below.

This was produced by Mrc Faggion using a Pioneer II Robot with a laser range-finder and utrasonic sensors. To do this, Marc first ``trained'' the robot to avoid obstacles. He used a method called behavioural cloning where the robot learned by imitating Marc, who gave examples of obstacle avoidance, using a joystick to control the robot. Once it had learned to avoid obstacles, the robot was let loose to build a map of the ground floor of the Samuels building.

The next stage of this project will be to give the robot some knowledge about who works in different locations on the map, where the printers and photocopiers are, etc. Then the robot can show a visitor around and generally be a helpful guide.

Questions that are related to this project are how you might get the robot to keep track of changes in the environment. This includes recognising sounds and tracking motion.