System Integration of a Tour Guide Robot

In today’s world, people visit many attractive places. On such an occasion, It is of utmost importance to be accompanied by a tour guide, who is known to explain about the cultural and historical importance of places. Therefore, a human guide is necessary to provide tours for a group of visitors. However, Human tour guides might face tiredness, distraction, and the effects of repetitive tasks while providing tour service to visitors. Robots eliminate these problems and can provide tour consistently until it drains its battery. This experiment introduces a tour-guide robot that can navigate autonomously in a known map of a given place and at the same time interact with people. The environment is equipped with artificial landmarks. Each landmark provides information about that specific region. An Animated avatar is simulated on the screen. IBM Watson provides voice recognition and text-to-speech services for human-robot interaction. The experimental results show that the robot takes average time of 10000 seconds to provide a tour. TEB and DWA local planner are compared by allowing the robot to autonomously maneuver the environment for 9 trials which is tabulated in section V.