The computerization of archaeology: survey on AI techniques

This paper analyses the application of artificial intelligence techniques to various areas of archaeology and more specifically: a) The use of software tools as a creative stimulus for the organization of exhibitions; the use of humanoid robots and holographic displays as guides that interact and involve museum visitors; b) The analysis of methods for the classification of fragments found in archaeological excavations and for the reconstruction of ceramics, with the recomposition of the parts of text missing from historical documents and epigraphs; c) The cataloguing and study of human remains to understand the social and historical context of belonging with the demonstration of the effectiveness of the AI techniques used; d) The detection of particularly difficult terrestrial archaeological sites with the analysis of the architectures of the Artificial Neural Networks most suitable for solving the problems presented by the site; the design of a study for the exploration of marine archaeological sites, located at depths that cannot be reached by man, through the construction of a freely explorable 3D version

Pepper4Museum: Towards a Human-like Museum Guide

With the recent advances in technology, new ways to engage visitors in a museum have been proposed. Relevant examples range from the simple use of mobile apps and interactive displays to virtual and augmented reality settings. Recently social robots have been used as a solution to engage visitors in museum tours, due to their ability to interact with humans naturally and familiarly. In this paper, we present our preliminary work on the use of a social robot, Pepper in this case, as an innovative approach to engaging people during museum visiting tours. To this aim, we endowed Pepper with a vision module that allows it to perceive the visitor and the artwork he is looking at, as well as estimating his age and gender. These data are used to provide the visitor with recommendations about artworks the user might like to see during the visit. We tested the proposed approach in our research lab and preliminary experiments show its feasibility

Accessibility and Technology: Remote Access to Art through Telepresence Robotics

This capstone project details a proposal for a remote tour pilot program and community partnership written for the Art Institute of Chicago, Snow City Arts and the John H Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County. The proposal seeks to provide a model for remote accessibility to art museums for visitors with mobility disabilities. The pilot program utilizes telepresence technology as a tool for providing remote tours and for emulating the social benefits of a museum visit. Within the program, telepresence technology becomes a mechanism for communication and collaboration between the museum and members of the community, allowing individuals previously unable to visit to experience the collection and contribute to the museum’s interpretive narrative. The result is a reciprocal relationship between community and museum and a tangible project archived as digital content

System Integration of a Tour Guide Robot

In today\u27s 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. Due to the advancements in technology, smartphones today have the capability to help a person navigate to any place in the world and can itself act as a tour guide by explaining a significance of a place. However, the person while looking into his phone might not watch his/her step and might collide with other moving person or objects. With a phone tour guide, the person is alone and is missing a sense of contact with other travelers. 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 be used on such an occasion. Tour guide robots 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

Towards modelling group-robot interactions using a qualitative spatial representation

This paper tackles the problem of finding a suitable qualitative representation for robots to reason about activity spaces where they carry out tasks interacting with a group of people. The Qualitative Spatial model for Group Robot Interaction (QS-GRI) defines Kendon-formations depending on: (i) the relative location of the robot with respect to other individuals involved in that interaction; (ii) the individuals' orientation; (iii) the shared peri-personal distance; and (iv) the role of the individuals (observer, main character or interactive). The evolution of Kendon-formations between is studied, that is, how one formation is transformed into another. These transformations can depend on the role that the robot have, and on the amount of people involved.Postprint (author's final draft

Guest Orientation, Assistance, and Telepresence Robot

The project was focused on a mobile research platform for autonomous navigation components and sensors vital to its autonomous interaction with its environment. The goal of this project was to create such a mobile robotic platform, which would in turn be capable of acting as a fully autonomous tour guide for the WPI campus. The project combined the robust capabilities of a Segway. Robotic Mobility Platform with the cutting edge adaptability of the Robot Operating System software framework. The robot will work in conjunction with school staff to provide video tour information as part of an enhanced tour experience. The project is a highly visible representation of WPI\u27s unique MQP program and its ability to prepare engineers capable of solving real world problems

Guest Orientation, Assistance, and Telepresence Robot

The project was focused on a mobile research platform for autonomous navigation components and sensors vital to its autonomous interaction with its environment. The goal of this project was to create such a mobile robotic platform, which would in turn be capable of acting as a fully autonomous tour guide for the WPI campus. The project combined the robust capabilities of a Segway Robotic Mobility Platform with the cutting edge adaptability of the Robot Operating System software framework. The robot will work in conjunction with school staff to provide video tour information as part of an enhanced tour experience. The project is a highly visible representation of WPI\u27s unique MQP program and its ability to prepare engineers capable of solving real world problems

Probabilistic Hybrid Action Models for Predicting Concurrent Percept-driven Robot Behavior

This article develops Probabilistic Hybrid Action Models (PHAMs), a realistic causal model for predicting the behavior generated by modern percept-driven robot plans. PHAMs represent aspects of robot behavior that cannot be represented by most action models used in AI planning: the temporal structure of continuous control processes, their non-deterministic effects, several modes of their interferences, and the achievement of triggering conditions in closed-loop robot plans. The main contributions of this article are: (1) PHAMs, a model of concurrent percept-driven behavior, its formalization, and proofs that the model generates probably, qualitatively accurate predictions; and (2) a resource-efficient inference method for PHAMs based on sampling projections from probabilistic action models and state descriptions. We show how PHAMs can be applied to planning the course of action of an autonomous robot office courier based on analytical and experimental results

Spatial context-aware person-following for a domestic robot

Domestic robots are in the focus of research in terms of service providers in households and even as robotic companion that share the living space with humans. A major capability of mobile domestic robots that is joint exploration of space. One challenge to deal with this task is how could we let the robots move in space in reasonable, socially acceptable ways so that it will support interaction and communication as a part of the joint exploration. As a step towards this challenge, we have developed a context-aware following behav- ior considering these social aspects and applied these together with a multi-modal person-tracking method to switch between three basic following approaches, namely direction-following, path-following and parallel-following. These are derived from the observation of human-human following schemes and are activated depending on the current spatial context (e.g. free space) and the relative position of the interacting human. A combination of the elementary behaviors is performed in real time with our mobile robot in different environments. First experimental results are provided to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed approach

The Turtlebot Tour Guide (TTG)

Applied project submitted to the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Ashesi University, in partial fulfillment of Bachelor of Science degree in Management Information Systems, 2019The Turtlebot Tour Guide project is a project that was started in a robotics class. Since then, the project has been worked on within classes, by work-study students and even as capstone projects. The aim of the project is to model a Turtlebot to be a tour-guide that can effectively conduct tour processes within Ashesi University. The project involves mapping of Ashesi University, the creation of path-planning algorithms and other modules. This project plans to improve and complete previous work that has been done on the Turtlebot Tour Guide in a way that makes it functional and effective for tours within Ashesi University.Ashesi Universit