Museum tour guide robot with augmented reality

Many mobile robots have been deployed in various museums to interact with people naturally. The key requirements of a museum tour guide robot are how well it interacts with people and how well it localizes itself. Once those are accomplished, the robot can successfully educate and entertain people. In this paper, we propose a museum tour guide robot which uses augmented reality (AR) technologies to improve human-robot interaction and a localization method to find out its precise position and orientation. The AR museum tour guide robot can augment such multimedia elements as virtual 3D objects, movie clips, or sound clips to real artifacts in a museum. This characteristic of the robot can be achieved by knowing its whereabouts precisely, which is achieved by use of a hybrid localization method. The experimental results confirm that the robot can communicate with people effectively and localize accurately in a complex museum environment.