The Network Robot System: Enabling Social Human- Robot Interaction in Public Spaces

What kind of framework is needed to realize social robot applications in real public environments? Based on several years of experience in conducting field studies with social robots in public spaces, we identify key considerations that we have found to be indispensable in the development of robot services. We present a "network robot system" framework, which supports social robot services in five ways: observation of human behavior using environmental sensor networks, structured knowledge sharing, centralized resource and service allocation, global path planning for coordination between robots, and support for selected recognition and decision tasks by a human operator. We describe our network robot system implementation and present a demonstration in a shopping mall, illustrating how such a network robot system framework can be used to support heterogeneous teams of robots providing services in a real public environment.