Experiences with two Deployed Interactive Tour-Guide Robots

This paper describes and compares two pioneering mobile robot systems, which were recently deployed as interactive tour-guides in two museums. Both robots demonstrated safe and reliable navigation in proximity of people. They also interacted with museum visitor through various means, including the Web. Probabilistic algorithms and learning are pervasive in their software architectures. This article sketches the basic software, summarizes results, compares the robots, and discusses open problems.