Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
R. E. Bellman. Dynamic Programming. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1957.
J. Borenstein, B. Everett, and L. Feng. Navigating Mobile Robots: Systems and Techniques. A. K. Peters, Ltd., Wellesley, MA, 1996.
W. Burgard, A.B. Cremers, D. Fox, G. Lakemeyer, D. Hahnei, D. Schulz, W. Steiner, and S, Thrun. The interactive museum tour-guide robot. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1998.
W. Burgard, D. Fox, D. Hennig, and T. Schmidt. Estimating the absolute position of a mobile robot using position probability grids. In Proc. of the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 896–901, 1996.
I.J. Cox. Blanche—an experiment in guidance and navigation of an autonomous robot vehicle. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 7 (2): 193–204, 1991.
T. L. Dean and M. Boddy. Ail analysis of time-dependent planning. In Proceeding of Seventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI-92 pages 49–54, Menlo Park, CA, 1988. AAAI, AAAI Press/The MIT Press.
A. Elfes. Occupancy Grids: A Probabilistic Framework for Robot Perception and Navigation. PhD thesis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, 1989.
C. Fedor. TCX. An interprocess communication system for building robotic architectures. Programmer’s guide to version lO.xx. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, 12 1993.
D. Fox, W. Burgard, and S. Thrun. The dynamic window approach to collision avoidance. IEEE Robotics and Automation, 4 (1), 1997.
D. Fox, W. Burgard, S. Thrun, and A.B. Cremers. A hybrid collision avoidance method for mobile robots. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 1998.
D. Fox, W. Burgard, S. Thrun, and A.B. Cremers. Position estimation for mobile robots in dynamic environments. In Proceedings of AAAI-98. AAAI Press/The MIT Press, 1998.
D. Hähnel, W. Burgard, and G. Lakemeyer. GOLEX — bridging the gap between logic (GOLOG) and a real robot. In Proc. of the 22nd German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI’98).
Joachim Hertzberg and Frank Kirchner. Landmark-based autonomous navigation in sewerage pipes. In Proceedings of the First Euromicro Workshop on Advanced Mobile Robots (EUROMICRO ’96), pages 68–73. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1996.
R. A. Howard. Dynamic Programming and Markov Processes. MIT Press and Wiley, 1960.
L.P. Kaelbling, A.R. Cassandra, and J.A. Kurien. Acting under uncertainty: Discrete bayesian models for mobile-robot navigation. In Proc. of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 1996.
S. King and C. Weiman. Helpmate autonomous mobile robot navigation system. In Proceedings of the SPIE Conference on Mobile Robots, pages 190–198, Boston, MA, November 1990. Volume 2352.
H.J. Levesque, R. Reiter, Y. Lesperance, F. Lin, and R. Schert. GOLOG: A logic programming language for dynamic domains. Journal of Logic Programming, 31: 59–84, 1997.
J. McCarthy. Situations, actions and causal laws. In Semantic Information Processing, pages 410–417. MIT Press, 1968.
H. P. Moravec. Sensor fusion in certainty grids for mobile robots. AI Magazine, pages 61–74, Summer 1988.
I. Nourbakhsh, R. Powers, and S. Birchfield. DERVISH an office-navigating robot. AI Magazine, 16 (2): 53–60, Summer 1995.
R. Simmons, R. Goodwin, K. Haigh, S. Koenig, and J. O’Sullivan. A layered architecture for office delivery robots. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Marina del Rey, CA, February 1997.
R. Simmons and S. Koenig. Probabilistic robot navigation in partially observable environments. In Proc. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1995.
S. Thrun. Learning maps for indoor mobile robot navigation. Artificial Intelligence, 99(1), 1998.
S. Thrun, A. Bücken, W. Burgard, D. Fox, T. Fröhlinghaus, D. Hennig, T. Hofmann, M. Krell, and T. Schimdt. Map learning and high-speed navigation in RHINO. In D. Kortenkamp, R.P. Bonasso, and R. Murphy, editors, AI-based Mobile Robots: Case studies of successful robot systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Burgard, W. et al. (1999). The Museum Tour-Guide Robot RHINO. In: Wörn, H., Dillmann, R., Henrich, D. (eds) Autonome Mobile Systeme 1998. Informatik aktuell. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-60043-2_29
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-60043-2_29
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65192-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-60043-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive