Experiences from the Use of a Robotic Avatar in a Museum Setting

Access to cultural exhibits is a central issue in museums and exhibition galleries that is recently approached under a new, technological perspective. Although the cultural industries practices in the cases of museums and cultural exhibits have remained practically unchanged for long, in recent years we are witnessing a gradual adoption of media-technologies in various aspects, such as collections archiving and digital document preservation, media- and Web-presentation, graphical animations, etc. Lately, Internet and Web-based technologies have been employed for providing access, mostly to images of exhibited objects. In few cases, the incorporation of higher-end technology, such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, or robotics, is explored. In this paper we present such an effort, the TOURBOT project (an acronym for TOUr-guide RoBOT), which emphasizes the development of alternative ways for interactive museum telepresence, essentially through the use of robotic "avatars", and comment on the experience gained from its use in a museum setting