
doi: 10.5772/5950
Autonomous service robot applications can be divided in two main groups: outdoor and field robots, and indoor robots. Autonomous lawnmowers, de-mining and search and rescue robots, mars rovers, automated cargo, unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles, are some applications of field robotics. The term indoor robotics usually applies to autonomous mobile robots that move in a typical populated indoor environment. Robotic vacuum cleaners, entertainment and companion robots or security and surveillance applications are also some examples of successful indoor robot applications. Probably, one of the first real world applications of indoor service robots has been that of mobile robots serving as tour guides in museums or exhibitions. Such one is an extremely interesting application for researchers because allows them to advance in knowledge fields as autonomous navigation in dynamic environments, human robot interaction, indoor environment modelling with simultaneous localization and map building, etc., while also serving as a showcase for attracting the general public as well as possible investors. We have developed our own interactive mobile robot called Urbano, especially designed to be a tour guide in exhibitions. This chapter describes the Urbano robot system, its hardware, software and the experiences we have obtained through its development and use until its actual mature stage. This chapter doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive technical description of algorithms, mathematical or implementation details, but just an overview of the system. The interested reader will be referred to more specific bibliography for these details. The rest of the chapter is structured as follows: This section presents the related work, other existing systems, as well as our motivation to develop our own robot. Section 2 presents an overview of Urbano, the description of its hardware and also the software components in which the robot control is structured. These components are afterwards described in subsequent sections: Section 3 describes the feature based mapping and navigation subsystem, while the interaction capabilities including our own proprietary voice recognition and synthesis engine will be described in section 4. Section 5 briefly describes the web based remote visit that Urbano is also able to perform. The integration of all these components is managed through a programmable kernel that allows a high level management of all modules, described in section 6. The chapter ends with the presentation of some successful real deployments of Urbano in section 7, and our conclusions in section 8.
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