Design, Implementation and Exploitation of a New Fully Autonomous Tour Guide Robot

This paper presents the genesis of a tour guide robot, which has been built from the scratch based on the experience of the Autonomous Systems Lab. The production of 11 of those machines has been realized by a spin-off of the lab: BlueBotics SA. The goal was to maximize the autonomy and interactivity of the mobile platform while ensuring high robustness, security and performance. The result is an interactive moving machine named RoboX. RoboX can operate in human environments and interacts by seeing humans, talking to and looking at them, showing icons and asking them to answer its questions. The complete design of mechanics, electronics and software is presented in the first part. Then, as extraordinary test bed, the Robotics exhibition at Expo.02 (Swiss National Exhibition) permits to establish meaningful statistics over five months (from May 15 to October 20, 2002) with up to 11 robots operating at the same time.