Evolving an effective robot tour guide

Guiding visitors through an exhibit space such as a museum is an important, early application for mobile robots, and commercial robots designed for this purpose have become available. We consider the problem of using a single mobile robot to simultaneously direct multiple groups of visitors through a museum or exhibition, and formulate an objective function for this task. We show that an evolutionary robotics approach using a simple, low-fidelity simulator and genetic programming can automatically generate robot controllers which can perform this task better than hand-coded controllers as well as humans in both simulation and on a real robot.