Autonomous and Interactive Robot Tour Guide

Kaveh Fathian

kaveh.fathian@mines.edu

The aim of this project is to design autonomy algorithms and software that enable an autonomous robot tour guide. Our long-term vision is to create a robot dog tour guide (using the Boston Dynamics Spot robot at ARIA lab) that guides visitors around campus buildings autonomously and provides information. The display onboard robot will dynamically show facts or information about points of interest around campus for the visitors.  We will further add user input functionalities, which will allow the visitors to tell the robot where they want to go next. The student assigned to this project will work/collaborate with the Autonomy team at the ARIA lab. Toward materializing the project vision, the student will implement algorithms that enable the robot to avoid obstacles and adapt to a challenging dynamic environment, such as crowded environments with many pedestrians. In addition, AI and deep learning techniques will be used to detect and track pedestrians, consequently, allowing the robot to keep track of the visitors while autonomously navigating to the next location. We expect the impact of this project to go beyond providing robotic tours. As the project enables a robot to both display and receive information to and from the users,  we expect this functionality will further find application in assistive robotics, healthcare and hospitality, and interactive learning. 

Grand Challenge: Engineer the tools of scientific discovery.

Lab website: https://www.ariarobotics.com/ Autonomous navigation (Nav2): https://navigation.ros.org Community-made plugins for Nav2: https://navigation.ros.org/plugins/index.html ROS documentation: https://docs.ros.org/en/humble Computer vision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_vision Human-robot Interaction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93robot_interaction    

Kaveh Fathian