Toward Museum Guide Robots Proactively Initiating Interaction with Humans

Abstract

This paper describes current work toward the design of a guide robot system. We present a method to recognize people's interest and intention from their walking trajectories in indoor environments, which enables a service robot to proactively approach people to provide services to them. We conducted observational experiments in a museum as a target test environment where participants were asked to visit that museum. From these experiments, we have found mainly three kinds of walking trajectory patterns of the participants inside the museum that depend on their interest in the exhibits. Based on these findings, we developed a method to identify participants that may need guidance.We confirm the effectiveness of our method by experiments.