The autonomous tour-guide robot Jinny

Abstract

This paper explains a new tour-guide robot Jinny. The Jinny is developed by focusing on human robot interaction and autonomous navigation. In order to achieve reliable and safe navigation performance, an integrated navigation strategy is established based on the analysis of a robot's states and the decision making process of robot behaviors. According to the condition of environments, the robot can select its motion algorithm among four types of navigation strategy. Also, we emphasized the manageability of a robot's knowledge base for human friendly interactions. The robot's knowledge base can be extended or modified intuitively enough to be managed by non-experts. In order to show the feasibility and effectiveness of our system, we also present experimental results of the navigation system and some experiences on practical installations.