A vision based guide robot system: Initiating proactive social human robot interaction in museum scenarios

This paper presents a guide robot system which observes people's interest and intention towards paintings in museum scenarios and proactively offers guidance to them using a guide robot, if needed. To do that, we utilized multiple USB video camera sensors to support the guide robot in detecting and tracking people's visual focus of attention (VFOA) toward paintings. In this study, we consider each person's head orientation and profile information and compute importance values to identify a target-person that may be interested in a particular painting. After identifying the target-person, the guide robot moves autonomously through an appropriate motion path from the so called public-distance to his/her social-distance to explain details about the painting to which s/he is interested. Furthermore, we demonstrate the viability of our guide robot system by experimenting with the Robovie-R3 as a museum guide robot. Finally, we tested the system to validate its effectiveness.