Learning to Be a Good Tour-Guide Robot

Thanks to the numerous attempts that are being made to develop autonomous robots, increasingly intelligent and cognitive skills are allowed. This paper proposes an automatic presentation generator for a robot guide, which is considered one more cognitive skill. The presentations are made up of groups of paragraphs. The selection of the best paragraphs is based on a semantic understanding of the characteristics of the paragraphs, on the restrictions defined for the presentation and by the quality criteria appropriate for a public presentation. This work is part of the ROBONAUTA project of the Intelligent Control Research Group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid to create "awareness" in a robot guide. The software developed in the project has been verified on the tour-guide robot Urbano. The most important aspect of this proposal is that the design uses learning as the means to optimize the quality of the presentations. To achieve this goal, the system has to perform the optimized decision making, in different phases. The modeling of the quality index of the presentation is made using fuzzy logic and it represents the beliefs of the robot about what is good, bad, or indifferent about a presentation. This fuzzy system is used to select the most appropriate group of paragraphs for a presentation. The beliefs of the robot continue to evolving in order to coincide with the opinions of the public. It uses a genetic algorithm for the evolution of the rules. With this tool, the tour guide-robot shows the presentation, which satisfies the objectives and restrictions, and automatically it identifies the best paragraphs in order to find the most suitable set of contents for every public profile

ToGouR: Tour Guide Robot Visualization using Shape Recognition Pattern for Automatic Navigation

The invention of autonomous robots with an increasing demand for industrial used has been caught attention from researchers and inventors. In this new sophisticated era, various types of robots and systems have been developed and bring significant contribution to the industries, economy, and infrastructure. Thus in this project, we have develop an application for PIC based Tour Guide Robot (ToGouR) where the PIC16F877A has been chosen as the main microcontroller. The application has a Graphical User Interface (GUI) has allows the user to interact in interactive ways between ToGouR and the images for navigation systems. The application also has an ability to perform shape recognition for path planning and automatically make alternative ways when various shapes that have been recognized are put in the way. Various alternatives have been used to make sure this project is successful carried out. This tour guide robot is suitable to be commercialized with numerous robotics companies that would like collaborate in delivering this project as a product and can be used for military or during any unexpected catastrophe such as one that occurred in Japan