Recognizing groups of visitors for a robot museum guide tour

In this paper, we propose a robot system able to take visitors on guided tours in a museum. When developing a robot capable of giving a tour of an actual museum, it is necessary to implement a robot system able to measure the location and orientation of the visitors using bearing sensors installed in a specific environment. Furthermore, the robot needs information pertaining to both tour attendees and other visitors in the vicinity, in order to effectively lead a tour for the attendees. Therefore, we propose a new robot system consisting of simple elements such as a laser range finder attached to a pole. By merely placing the sensor poles, we can track the location and orientation of visitors. We employ a group detection method to distinguish tour attendees from other people around the robot. In contrast to previous group detection methods our method can recognize a group of people even when they are not walking. In experiments our system successfully tracked and grouped visitors in the vicinity even when they were just standing.