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Abstract-The purpose of our research is to develop a humanoid museum guide robot that performs intuitive, multimodal interaction with multiple persons. In this paper, we present a robotic system that makes use of visual perception, sound source localization, and speech recognition to detect, track, and involve multiple persons into interaction. Depending on the audio-visual input, our robot shifts its attention between different persons. In order to direct the attention of its communication partners towards exhibits, our robot performs gestures with its eyes and arms. As we demonstrate in practical experiments, our robot is able to interact with multiple persons in a multimodal way and to shift its attention between different people. Furthermore, we discuss experiences made during a two-day public demonstration of our robot.

Abstract-In this paper, we present the humanoid communication robot Fritz. Our robot communicates with people in an intuitive, multimodal way. Fritz uses speech, facial expressions, eye-gaze, and gestures to interact with people. Depending on the audio-visual input, our robot shifts its attention between different persons in order to involve them into the conversation. He performs human-like arm gestures during the conversation and also uses pointing gestures generated with eyes, head, and arms to direct the attention of its communication partners towards objects of interest. To express its emotional state, the robot generates facial expressions and adapts the speech synthesis. We discuss experiences made during two public demonstrations of our robot.

Abstract-Wheeled tour guide robots have already been deployed in various museums or fairs worldwide. A key requirement for successful tour guide robots is to interact with people and to entertain them. Most of the previous tour guide robots, however, focused more on the involved navigation task than on natural interaction with humans. Humanoid robots, on the other hand, offer a great potential for investigating intuitive, multimodal interaction between humans and machines. In this paper, we present our mobile full-body humanoid tour guide robot Robotinho. We provide mechanical and electrical details and cover perception, the integration of multiple modalities for interaction, navigation control, and system integration aspects. The multimodal interaction capabilities of Robotinho have been designed and enhanced according to the questionnaires filled out by the people who interacted with the robot at previous public demonstrations. We present experiences we have made during experiments in which untrained users interacted with the robot.

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