The Autonomous City Explorer: Towards Natural Human-Robot Interaction in Urban Environments

摘要

The Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) project combines research from autonomous outdoor navigation and human-robot interaction. The ACE robot is capable of navigating unknown urban environments without the use of GPS data or prior map knowledge. It finds its way by interacting with pedestrians in a natural and intuitive way and building a topological representation of its surroundings. In a recent experiment the robot managed to successfully travel a 1.5 km distance from the campus of the Technische Universität München to Marienplatz, the central square of Munich. This article describes the principles and system components for navigation in urban environments, information retrieval through natural human-robot interaction, the construction of a suitable semantic representation as well as results from the field experiment.