Communication Robot for Science Museum with RFID Tags

Abstract

This paper reports about an interactive humanoid robots, Robovie, that work in a science museum where visitors are supposed to study and grow interests toward science. Each visitor wore an RFID tag, and looked around exhibits in the museum. Robovie has an implemented function for an autonomous interaction as free-play [1] . Moreover, it obtains its exact position, visitors' positions, and their moving history in the museum from ubiquitous sensor networks, including RFID tag readers, recording cameras and infrared cameras. It performs exhibits-guiding by moving around to several exhibits and explaining these exhibits based on the sensor information, in addition to the freeplay interaction. We compared the effect of the exhibits-guiding and the free-play interaction under three operating conditions. As a result, the free-play interaction and exhibits-guiding contributed to promote visitors' interests for science, while Robovie mostly received higher subjective impression, which is probably due to its novelty.