A Method for Guiding a Person Combining Robot Movement and Projection

This paper proposes a new method to guide a person along with a route when a mobile robot explains an exhibition. In previous work, there were problems that people overtake the robot and go out of the guide route, and that people move to positions that interferes with the movement of the robot. In response to these problems, a conventional solution is to frequently instruct people to move by using voice, displays, etc., and it was not a comfortable for people who are guided. In this paper, we focus on a mobile robot with a projection function and propose a method of controlling human positions without explicit instructions by combining movement and projection of a robot. We introduce three basic guiding behaviors combining projection and movement, each controlling a person and a robot into different positional relationship according to the situation of guiding. Experiments of basic guiding behaviors showed that both the existence of the robot and the position of the projected image are combined to affect the movement of the guided person. The result indicates that by selecting appropriate guide behavior according to the situation of guiding, the robot can guide a person effectively while controlling the position of the person.