Personalized Guided Tour by Multiple Robots through Semantic Profile Definition and Dynamic Redistribution of Participants

Existing robot guides are able to offer a tour of a building, such as a museum, bank, science center, to a single person or to a group of participants. Usually the tours are predefined and there is no support for dynamic interactions between multiple robots. This paper focuses on distributed collaboration between several robot guides providing a building tour to groups of participants. Semantic techniques are adopted in order to formally define the tour topics, available content on a specific topic, and the robot and human profiles including their interests and content knowledge. The robot guides select different topics depending on their participants’ interests and prior knowledge. Optimization of the topics of interests is achieved through exchange of participants between the robot guides whenever in each others neighborhood. Evaluation of the implemented algorithms presents a 90% content coverage of relevant topics for the individual participants.