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MINERVA: A second generation mobile tour-guide robot

Sebatian Thrun, Maren Bennewitz, Wolfram Burgard, Armin B. Cremers, Frank Dellaert, Dieter Fox, Dirk Haehnel, Charles Rosenberg, Nicholas Roy, Jamieson Schulte, and Dirk Schulz

This paper describes an interactive tour-guide robot, which was successfully exhibited in a Smithsonian museum. During its two weeks of operation, the robot interacted with thousands of people, traversing more than 44 km at speeds of up to 163 cm/sec. Our approach specifically addresses issues such as safe navigation in unmodified and dynamic environments, and short-term human-robot interaction. It uses learning pervasively at all levels of the software architecture.

The full paper is available in gzipped Postscript and PDF

@INPROCEEDINGS{Thrun99a,
  AUTHOR         = {Thrun, S. and Bennewitz, M. and Burgard, W. and 
                    Cremers, A.B. and Dellaert, F. and Fox, D. and 
                    H\"{a}hnel, D. and Rosenberg, C. and Roy, N. and 
                    Schulte, J. and Schulz, D.},
  TITLE          = {{MINERVA}: A second generation mobile tour-guide robot},
  YEAR           = {1999},
  BOOKTITLE      = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference 
                    on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)}
}