Tracking visitors with sensor poles for robot's museum guide tour

In this paper, we propose a robot system which can take visitors on guided tours in a museum. When we consider developing a robot capable of giving a tour of an actual museum, we must implement a robot system able to measure the location and orientation of the robot and visitors using bearing sensors installed in a specific environment. Although many previous methods employed markers or tags attached to the robot to obtain positional information through cameras, it is not easy to situate sensors in the environment itself. SLAM is also used to localize the position of the robot. However, its robustness may not be sufficient when the system is deployed in an actual real-life situation since there will be many people moving freely around the robot. On the other hand, the robot needs information pertaining to both tour attendees and other visitors in the vicinity, in order to give a tour for the attendees. Therefore, we propose a new robot system which consists of simple devices such as multiple laser range finders attached to a pole. By just placing the sensor poles, we could track the location and orientation of the robot and visitors at the same time. We then conducted experiments to confirm the effectiveness and accuracy of our system. In addition, we conducted demonstrative experiments that our robot takes three visitors to the guide tour.