Development of Smart Showroom

We have been studying “Smart Robotics Building”. That is an idea of a building where robots can easily move and offer various services to us, using IT infrastructures around them. “Smart Showroom” is a part of “Smart Robotics Building”. In the showroom, a robot automatically gives us a grand tour around exhibitions. The system is composed of the following elements; a mobile robot, an area monitor server which detects people staying in predefined areas, a position server which detects robot positions with sensors on the ceiling, a navigation server which determines the robot routing and controls the robot to a destination, a service server which controls the robot voice and projector on the robot head, and a guidance client with which we can compose automatic guidance procedure. These servers and the client on the computers network are a distributed autonomous system. This paper shows the system and a result of a demonstration experiment.