The Museum Tour-Guide Robot RHINO

This paper describes the software architecture of the autonomous mobile tour-guide robot RHINO which guided hundreds of visitors during a six-day deployment period through the exhibition of the “Deutsches Museum Bonn” and interacted with them in different ways. The robot’s control software integrates low-level probabilistic reasoning with high-level problem solving embedded in first order logic. A collection of new techniques, 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 facilitated the interaction with users in the museum and furthermore allowed Web users to become virtual visitors of the museum.