A cloud robotics system for telepresence enabling mobility impaired people to enjoy the whole museum experience

Abstract

We present a novel robotic telepresence platform composed by a semi-autonomous mobile robot based on a cloud robotics framework, which has been developed with the aim of enabling mobility impaired people to enjoy museums and archaeological sites that would be otherwise inaccessible. Such places, in fact, very often are not equipped to provide access for mobility impaired people, in particular because these aids require dedicated infrastructures that may not fit within the environment and large investments. For this reason, people affected by mobility impairments are often unable to enjoy a part or even the entire museum experience. Solutions allowing mobility impaired people to enjoy museum experience are often based on recorded tours, thus they do not allow active participation of the user. On the contrary, the presented platform is intended to allow users to enjoy completely the museum round. A robot equipped with a camera is placed within the museum and users can control it in order to follow predefined tours or freely explore the museum. Our solution ensures that users see exactly what the robot is seing in real-time. The cloud robotics platform controls both navigation capabilities and teleoperation. Navigation tasks are intended to let the robot reliably follow pre-defined tours, while main concern of teleoperation tasks is to ensure robot safety (e.g., by means of dynamic obstacle detection and avoidance software). Proposed platform has been optimized to maximize user experience.