Veronica JagBot: A Robotic Campus Tour Guide

In this paper we present a description of an autonomous mobile robot currently being designed and constructed at the University of South Alabama. The robot will function as a tour guide to interact with prospective students and other interested groups to answer questions related to the University and its academic programs. The robot, named Veronica JagBot is intended to promote human computer interaction and to enhance the acceptance of robots by the general public. Interaction with the robot will be accomplished entirely with speech recognition with responses from the robot being in the form of synthesized speech. JagBot will be capable of recognizing and answering questions from the audience as well as autonomous navigation about the campus in response to verbal commands.