Gesture-based interaction with voice feedback for a tour-guide robot

• We describe a guide robot with advanced human–robot interaction.
• The robot includes a laser scanner, a range camera and a RGB camera.
• We describe the human detection, tracking, recognition and interaction capabilities.
• Its quality in use is evaluated with over 20 users at real world environments.
• The robot participates in four events with successful results.

Any service robot should possess some kind of human–robot interaction to communicate with users. In this paper we present a tour-guide robot able to recognize hand gestures and provide voice feedback. A user can communicate with the robot using hand movements, but also through virtual buttons which are shown in a augmented reality environment in the robot’s screen. Moreover, the user continuously receives feedback from the robot’s screen or by means of voice messages. The result is a robot that understands the users’ needs and which keeps them informed about what it senses, which increases the usefulness of our robot. Finally, to measure the quality in use, we have conducted two user studies, which we have used to reveal and correct the weakness of the robot. The guide robot was successfully tested in several real world environments.