GUI3DXBot: An Interactive Software Tool for a Tour-Guide Mobile Robot

Abstract

Nowadays, mobile robots begin to appear in public places. To do these tasks properly, mobile robots must interact with humans. This paper presents the development of GUI3DXBot, a software tool for a tour-guide mobile robot. The paper focuses on the development of different software modules needed to guide users in an office building. In this context, GUI3DXBot is a server-client application, where the server side runs into the robot, and the client side runs into a 10-inch Android tablet. The GUI3DXBot server side is in charge of performing the perception, localization-mapping, and path planning tasks. The GUI3DXBot client side implements the human-robot interface that allows users requesting-canceling a tour-guide service, showing robot localization in the map, interacting with users, and tele-operating the robot in case of emergency. The contributions of this paper are twofold: it proposes a software modules design to guide users in an office building, and the whole robot system was well integrated and fully tested. GUI3DXBot were tested using software integration and field tests. The field tests were performed over a two-week period, and a survey to users was conducted. The survey results show that users think GUI3DXBot is friendly and intuitive, the goal selection was very easy, the interactive messages were very easy to understand, 90% of users found useful the robot icon on the map, users found useful drawing the path on the map, 90% of users found useful the local-global map view, and the guidance experience was very satisfactory (70%) and satisfactory (30%).