Robot companions for guiding people in urban areas

Abstract

In this paper we explain some developments on robot guidance of people and how we manage the robust navigation in urban areas. This work is part of the research of ongoing EU and national research projects (URUS, Rob- TaskCoop, CONET). We describe the Discrete Time Model for people guidance by robots, how we optimize the tasks of the robots for doing the guidance mission and how we have verified the model comparing the model results against the ground truth of people and robot motions. In this verification we have assumed that people are not afraid by the robot motions. We also describe the robust navigation method that is used by the robots that perform the guiding mission showing some examples of navigation in the Barcelona Robot Lab, an outdoor lab of 10.000m sq m.