Roslyn: A Tour Guide Robot Jared Rhizor, Timothy Sweet, Nishok Yadav Advisor: Dr. David Feil-Seifer Instructor: Dr. Sergiu Dascalu Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno Roslyn is an autonomous robotic system which provides tours to users on the second floor of the Scrugham Engineering and Mines building. The robot is not only able to navigate the halls, but navigate them in a socially acceptable manner. This means it does not collide with pedestrians and does not leave its user behind. To interact with the user there is a touch-screen display mounted on top of the moving robot base. As the robot moves throughout the hall, information appears on the screen related to the landmarks being passed (i.e. laboratories and offices). The user is able to select a destination on the screen in order to begin the tour. Abstract Components Robot Operating System (ROS) Navigation: ROS Navigation provides safe, autonomous navigation based on the Particle Filter localization method. Social Navigation: The ROS Navigation system is augmented with a social navigation layer which identifies where the tour participants are and ensures the robot maintains a reasonable distance from them. User Interface: A mounted tablet allows the user to select a point of interest and get more information about it as the robot brings him or her to that point. User Interface Component Interactions Conclusion Roslyn is designed to be a modular and expandable system. It can be adapted to work in a different location; the map could be generated for that environment. Additionally, a different ROS-compatible robot could be used instead of the simple Pioneer base. Another base could provide additional functionality. For example, a robot with an arm could manipulate elevator controls for multi-floor tours. Open Source This work was supported by the University of Nevada College of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Robotics Lab, Office of Interdisciplinary and Undergraduate Research, and the Honors Program. Further Work Roslyn can perform safe tours and provide information to visitors of the Computer Science and Engineering Department. The interface allows the user to select any point of interest and select it as the destination. The current implementation for the second floor of SEM has labs, offices, and classrooms labeled as points of interest. While providing tours, Roslyn actively avoids obstacles and maintains a proper distance from the user. The robot software is easily extensible and has been demonstrated in multiple locations. Figure 3: The components in Roslyn. Interactions between components happen along the topics indicated. Figure 2: Roslyn’s final design. The robot, networking/computation units, and user interface are shown. Acknowledgements Roslyn is available as an open source code repository at goo.gl/228dCW under the BSD license. goo.gl/228dCW Figure 1: The user interface. (a) What users see when first approaching the robot. (b) The clickable map which users can use to get around the building. (c) The visual interface which shows users more information about their surroundings. (d) The final goodbye screen. (a) (b) (c) (d)