Probabilistic Algorithms and the Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot Minerva

S. Thrun, M. Beetz, M. Bennewitz, W. Burgard, A.B. Cremers, F. Dellaert, D. Fox, D. Haehnel, C. Rosenberg, N. Roy, J. Schulte, and D. Schulz

This paper describes Minerva, an interactive tour-guide robot that was successfully deployed in a Smithsonian museum. Minerva's software is pervasively probabilistic, relying on explicit representations of uncertainty in perception and control. This article describes Minerva's major software components, and provides a comparative analysis of the results obtained in the Smithsonian museum. During two weeks of highly successful operation, the robot interacted with thousands of people, both in the museum and through the Web, traversing more than 44km at speeds of up to 163 cm/sec in the unmodified museum.

The full paper is available in gzipped Postscript and PDF

@ARTICLE{Thrun00l,
  TITLE          = {Probabilistic Algorithms and the Interactive Museum Tour-Guide Robot Minerva},
  AUTHOR         = {Thrun, S. and Beetz, M. 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.},
  JOURNAL        = {International Journal of Robotics Research},
  YEAR           = {2000},
  VOLUME         = {19},
  NUMBER         = {11},
  PAGES          = {972--999}
}