Urbano, an Interactive Mobile Tour-Guide Robot
Diego Rodríguez-Losada, Fernando Matı́a, Ramón Galán, Miguel Hernando, Juan Manuel, Juan Manuel · InTech eBooks · 2008
Robots 2301.1 State of the art As previously stated, Urbano is not the first mobile tour-guide robot.There have been many others that have served as a reference for the mobile robots research community.Probably, the first one was Rhino (Burgard et al., 1999) robot from Bonn University, followed by Minerva (Thrun et al., 1999) from Pittsburgh, CMU and Bonn Universities.These robots meant important advances in mobile robot mapping, localization and reactive control, using commercial robot platforms as a hardware base for developments.Another approach was Sage (Nourbakhsh et al., 1999) robot that focused on a more commercial vision that was later accomplished by Mobot Inc. Sage robot uses artificial coloured landmarks in the environment to achieve a robust navigation.These robots were later followed by other derivative works as the robotic assistants for the elderly called Flo and Pearl (Montemerlo et al., 2002).These robots were afterwards followed by many others from different universities and research centers around the globe, as Albert from Freiburg University (Germany), Lefkos from Forth institute (Greece), Tito from Valladolid University-Cartif (Spain), Carl from Aveiro University (Portugal), just to cite some examples.All of them were interactive mobile robots to serve as tour guides.Recently, several other robotic tour guides have been developed and commercialized by some companies as the BlueBotics RoboX.Eleven RoboX were involved during 5 months in the Robotics exhibition at the International Expo 02.Industry giants have also built their own robotic guides, as Toyota TPR-Robina operating in their company headquarters.Likewise, Fujitsu developed the Enon robot that served as a guide in the Kyotaro Nishimura museum. Previous workOur initial trials with interactive robots were carried out with Blacky (Fig. 1), a robot for tour-guiding, tele-visit and entertainment.We developed navigation algorithms focussed on indoor, populated, complex and low structured environments.