Interactive museum tour platform: using robotics and mobile technologies

Studying the implications of human robot interaction requires considering several aspects of communication including both verbal and nonverbal. Understanding the subtle differences in how humans interact is the key to integrating robots into daily human interaction. The first step of our project was to design and construct a robotic platform capable of supporting the various field studies we wish to perform. The initial target of the study is to build an autonomous museum guide but our system is capable of working in other social interaction settings as well, such as in a large department or hardware store. The proposed research objectives include the effect of dialect on verbal communication, determining the emotions that a robot should express to convey additional meaning behind the speech, how the robot should interact with a group of people versus just a single individual, and other social interaction aspects.