Conception and realization of a multi-sensory interactive mobile office guide

Abstract

This paper describes the conception and realization of a multi-sensory interactive mobile office guide. We designed a mobile robot based on a modified pioneer-2 robot, which is able to welcome visitors in our department and guide them to the desired staff member. The main components of the system are a vision based multi-person-tracker and the existing navigation toolkit CARMEN. Furthermore, the robot provides a bidirectional video conference system and a speech synthesis system. Experimental results show, that the implemented multi-person-tracker is accurately able to track an unknown number of persons in real-time and guide them to the respective people, while keeping an eye on the interaction partner.