Design And Implementation Of Tour-guide Robot

Service robot has attracted more academic and industrial concentration in recentdecades. The dissertation focuses on the design and implementation of a tour-guiderobot which named "Panpan". The main contributions of the dissertation can be notedas following:①This paper described the software architecture of the tour-guide control system which called master system in the project. The system could get information from envirenment and maintain sensor data. It provides transparent low-level control service with information management for high-level algorithms.②There is also a remote monitor system in the project which called console system. It transports data with master system embedded in Panpan based on wireless ethernet. Console system could show the conditions of the envirenment around Panpan by video, audio and sensor information. The system permits operator sending commands to Panpan directly to help him finish sophisticated tasks.③Also described in this paper is an improved path plan method which is more suitable for the system. There are two methods in the system, probabilistic roadmap method and quatree method. When user needs more than one path, system chooses the first method. When user needs the shortest path, system chooses the second one. The paper alse provides two methods for optimizing the results gained from the two path plan algorithms.④To overcome the problems during navigation of Panpan in dynamic environment using improved traditional virtual force field method which creates a active window to keep the history data. The new method avoids the bad conditions happened in the traditional way and it can work well when combines with pose estimation and location algorithm.⑤The paper alse described a debugging system for Panpan which helps to make system development more efficient.This robot was deployed in the exhibition hall of Changsha PANPAN securitydoor industry in April, 2009 for testing vision, speaking, path plan, obstacle avoidance,location, remote monitoring. These functions worked well and have proved thealgorithms' correctness and practicability.