Probabilistic Algorithms and the InteractiveMuseum Tour - Guide Robot

This paper describes Minerva, an interactive tour-guide robot that was successfully deployed in a Smithsonian museum. Minerva's software is pervasively prob-abilistic, relying on explicit representations of uncertainty in perception and control. This article describes Minerva's major software components, and provides a comparative analysis of the results obtained in the Smithsonian museum. During two weeks of highly successful operation, the robot interacted with thousands of people, both in the museum and through the Web, traversing more than 44km at speeds of up to 163 cm/sec in the unmodiied museum.