Rackham: An Interactive Robot-Guide

Aurélie Clodic (1) , Sara Fleury (1) , Rachid Alami (1) , Raja Chatila (1) , Gérard Bailly (2) , Ludovic Brèthes (1) , Maxime Cottret (1) , Patrick Danès (1) , Xavier Dollat (1) , Frédéric Elisei (2) , Isabelle Ferrané (3) , Matthieu Herrb (1) , Guillaume Infantes (1) , Christian Lemaire (1) , Frédéric Lerasle (1) , Jérôme Manhes (1) , Patrick Marcoul (1) , Paulo Menezes (1) , Vincent Montreuil (1)

1 LAAS - Laboratoire d'analyse et d'architecture des systèmes
2 ICP - Institut de la communication parlée
3 IRIT-SAMoVA - Équipe Structuration, Analyse et MOdélisation de documents Vidéo et Audio

Rackham is an interactive robot-guide that has been used in several places and exhibitions. This paper presents its design and reports on results that have been obtained after its deployment in a permanent exhibition. The project is conducted so as to incrementally enhance the robot functional and decisional capabilities based on the observation of the interaction between the public and the robot. Besides robustness and efficiency in the robot navigation abilities in a dynamic environment, our focus was to develop and test a methodology to integrate human-robot interaction abilities in a systematic way. We first present the robot and some of its key design issues. Then, we discuss a number of lessons that we have drawn from its use in interaction with the public and how that will serve to refine our design choices and to enhance robot efficiency and acceptability.

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Aurélie Clodic, Sara Fleury, Rachid Alami, Raja Chatila, Gérard Bailly, et al.. Rackham: An Interactive Robot-Guide. IEEE International Workshop on Robots and Human Interactive Communications (ROMAN), Sep 2006, Hatfield, United Kingdom. pp.502-509. ⟨hal-00480381⟩