Museum Guide Robot

Building autonomous robots that assist people in everyday life has been a long-standing goal of research into artificial intelligence and robotics. One of the interesting areas is a robot that is able to perform a number of tasks in a museum environment. In this project, we developed a prototype of a Museum Guide Robot (MGR) that can be used in the Omani National Museum. The robot’s primary task is to provide interactive tours to visitors of the museum. This application poses a variety of challenges, including (1) Integration of a suitable mechanical skeleton and all required sensors, motors, and control devices, (2) developing a navigation system that allows the robot to navigate safely and reliably through crowds, and (3) developing a human-interaction system to allow interactions with people in an intuitive and appealing way. The proposed MGR contains a high-level controller (HLC) that interprets the environment, plans the robot’s motion using AI-based algorithms, and generates motion commands. A low-level controller (LLC) receives these commands and controls the MGR’s motors accordingly.