Abstract

In today's world, people visit many attractive places. On such an occasion, It is of utmost importance to be accompanied by a tour guide, who is known to explain about the cultural and historical importance of places. Due to the advancements in technology, smartphones today have the capability to help a person navigate to any place in the world and can itself act as a tour guide by explaining a significance of a place. However, the person while looking into his phone might not watch his/her step and might collide with other moving person or objects. With a phone tour guide, the person is alone and is missing a sense of contact with other travelers. therefore a human guide is necessary to provide tours for a group of visitors. However, Human tour guides might face tiredness, distraction, and the effects of repetitive tasks while providing tour service to visitors. Robots eliminate these problems and can provide tour consistently until it drains its battery. This experiment introduces a tour-guide robot that can be used on such an occasion. Tour guide robots can navigate autonomously in a known map of a given place and at the same time interact with people. The environment is equipped with artificial landmarks. Each landmark provides information about that specific region. An Animated avatar is simulated on the screen. IBM Watson provides voice recognition and text-to-speech services for human-robot interaction.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Robots--Design and construction; Tour guides (Persons); Human-robot interaction

Publication Date

8-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Electrical Engineering (MS)

Department, Program, or Center

Electrical Engineering (KGCOE)

Advisor

Ferat Sahin

Advisor/Committee Member

Jamison Heard

Advisor/Committee Member

Gill R. Tsouri

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

Plan Codes

EEEE-MS

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