The Bryn Mawr Tour Guide Robot

Abstract

In this thesis I will discuss how a robotic tour guide that travels and displays two wings of Bryn Mawr College’s Park Science Building is created. The robot gives a pre-scripted, pre-planned tour using dynamic navigation and localization. Localization is carried out implementing a combination of dead reckoning and landmark detection which is based on vision. The robot interacts with visitors using speech recognition which has a limited vocabulary for recognition. The robot also uses speech to narrate the pre-scripted tour and give directions to visitors. I will also provide an overview of previous tour-giving robots as well as examine control strategies and details of our implementation. While most simliar projects are of the Ph.D. level, our focus will be to integrate several components to create the tour guide robot.