RHINO-VR Experience: Teaching Mobile Robotics Concepts in an Interactive Museum Exhibit

In 1997, the very first tour guide robot RHINO was deployed in a museum in Germany. With the ability to navigate autonomously through the environment, the robot gave tours to over 2,000 visitors. Today, RHINO itself has become an exhibit and is no longer operational In this paper, we present RHINO-VR, an interactive museum exhibit using virtual reality (VR) that allows museum visitors to experience the historical robot RHINO in operation in a virtual museum. RHINO-VR, unlike static exhibits, enables users to familiarize themselves with basic mobile robotics concepts without the fear of damaging the exhibit. In the virtual environment, the user is able to interact with RHINO in VR by pointing to a location to which the robot should navigate and observing the corresponding actions of the robot. To include other visitors who cannot use the VR, we provide an external observation view to make RHINO visible to them. We evaluated our system by measuring the frame rate of the VR simulation, comparing the generated virtual 3D models with the originals, and conducting a user study. The user study showed that RHINO-VR improved the visitors’ understanding of the robot’s functionality and that they would recommend experiencing the VR exhibit to others.