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When Robots Meet People: Research Directions In Mobile Robotics

Recent research in the field of mobile robotics has led to significant progress along various dimensions. Applications such as robots that guide blind or mentally handicapped people, robots that clean large office buildings and department stores, robots that assist people in recreational activities, etc., are clearly in reach, and for many of those target domains prototypes are readily available. This recent, ongoing revolution has been triggered by advances along various dimensions. Robotic hardware has steadily become cheaper and more reliable. Robotic software has matured, reaching critical levels of reliability, robustness, and flexibility. Mobile robots have an enormous potential to change our everyday lives. It is worth noting that an increasing fraction of these robots rely on methods developed in artificial intelligence. Together with researchers at the University of Bonn (W. Burgard, A.B. Cremers, D. Fox, D. Hahnel, G. Lakemeyer, D. Schultz and W. Steiner), and motivated in part by the work of Horswill [3], the author recently installed a mobile tourguide robot in a branch of the Deutsches Museum [1, 4]. The robot’s task was to guide visitors through the museum, explaining to them a subset of the museum’s exhibits. The major challenges that arose in this project can be grouped into two categories: navigation and human robot interaction.