A tour-guide robot: Moving towards interaction with humans

The aim of this research project is to develop a smart social robot showing sufficient intelligence to work as atour-guide in different environments. In doing so, both a software and a hardware architecture are proposed,the different modules of which, such as a laser, cameras, platform, face, and voice, among others, controlthe different components of the robot. Those components are in turn used by other modules designed fornavigation and interaction. A sensor fusion for the purposes of localization is implemented by means of anExtended Kalman Filter, which is one of the navigation module components, together with the proposed fuzzycontrollers needed for path following. A fuzzy emotion system that controls the face and the voice modulesalso forms part of this architecture for assisting interaction. Finally, all the modules are controlled with acustomized programming language that is a mixture of C, Pascal, and JavaScript. The modules are optimizedfor immediate execution to achieve realistic human–machine interaction.The results in this paper report the research supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Spain under DPI2017-86915-C3-3-R: Técnicas de Inteligencia Artificial y Ayuda a la Navegación Autónoma, and by Programas de Actividades I+D en la Comunidad de Madrid, cofunded with EU Structural Funds , through the EURoboCity2030-IV-CM project (Robótica aplicada a la mejora de la calidad de vida de los ciudadanos. fase IV; S2018/NMT-4331).Peer reviewe