Autonomous Robotic Agents

Autonomous service robots such as office couriers or museum tourguides have become challenging testbeds for developing and testing computational models of competent agency. In the previous years we have worked on two robotic museums tourguides and an autonomous robot office courier.

In 1997 and 1998 the robots RHINO and Minerva were deployed as tourguides in the Deutsches Museum Bonn, Germany and the National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. A Museum Tourguide Robot fulfills two purposes, it acts as a tourguide for on-site visitors, and it allows people on the Web to become tele-present in a distant museum, using the robot as an avatar.

The goal of these two projects was to bring robots closer to people and to prove, that the recent progress in robotics and AI research enables robots to operate highly reliably in crowded environments.

Currently, we are working on the Tourbot project. This project directly focuses on the application "Museum Tourguide Robot". Here computer scientists and museum people from Europe work together to improve on the specific requirements and the application design of such robots.