Development of an autonomous service robot for social interactions

Increasing research and development during these years has explored Human-Robot interactions especially for the challenge of the service robot. While service robots are becoming popular, these robots are just focusing into a specific tasks, and most of them are not ready prepare for the unpredictability of human environments. The efforts to develop more reliable robots that could interact with the human, are promoting the next generation of service robot. This type of robot would be equipped with perception, motion, and manipulation among other skills, to be help humans in daily tasks in different environments. This paper presents Snowie, a service robot used as Receptionist. The Snowie combines visual clues, voice, distance and PC input to detect humans and features in the environment. Guidance is one of the tasks that the receptionist robot must perform. To complete its task Snowie could receive extra information from smart beacons located in the building. The paper also explores two modalities to the guiding missions. Finally, experiments are presented in order to highlight the relevance of the approach.