FROG and baby-FROG (a customized MAGABOT platform) were at the Royal Alcázar in Seville from 24-28 February for integration work and tests. The Royal Alcázar is a wonderful place to visit. The palace is beautiful but leave time to wander in the well-tended gardens!
11 February 2014
FROG is on its way to Seville for the next Integration meeting at the Real Alcázar. The UPO team will make a final map of the Real Alcázar route in preparation for the arrival of the other partners on 24 February 2014.
FROG aspires to turn autonomous outdoor robots into viable location-based service providers. It will develop an outdoor guide robot, an emerging class of intelligent robot platforms.
Season’s greetings from Santa FROG!
On the 21st of November 2013, the FROG consortium had the review of their work during the second period of the project. The review was held in the Lisbon Zoo and the robot navigated autonomously and showed some simplified presentations at points of interest. Our thanks to the Lisbon Zoo for their hospitality.
Here is a video of the whole demo – watch out for the reviewer testing the robot’s safety measures: Demo for 2nd Year Review
Researchers enjoyed some harmless fun while waiting for feedback from the reviewers. Here, Dariu Gavrila can be seen on Jie Shen’s laptop screen. Jie was demonstrating mask overlays – an option he has added to Imperial’s face tracking software.
Dariu, who once told the project manager she was “too nice a person to make a threat really scary for someone actually born in Transsylvania” like himself, couldn’t wait to try the Dracula mask.
What do you do when you need to run outdoor tests with a robot platform without a shell as was the case in October 2013 in the Lisbon Zoo? Well, you can either pack it in plastic sheeting fixed with sticky back plastic, or you can be a gentleman and be ready with an umbrella.
On our way to Lisbon for a second round of experiments before the demo in November. We will perform several navigation experiments with the final FROG robot platform these days. Van ready, here we go!
Open-air integration work at the Lisbon Zoo – Carlos Marques (IDMind) and André Almeida and Filipe Tavares (both YDreams) .
During the FROG-meeting in Seville in May 2013, we did exploratory studies to find out how naïve people react to a (tour guide) robot that is approaching them and giving a short tour. During these experiments, the robot was remotely controlled by one of the partners from Universidad de Pablo Olavide.
On Tuesday we did an experiment with a robot approaching visitors, without any further actions of the robot. This kind of research has previously done in lab-settings, but not in real-life settings as we did. The preliminary results show that people tend to react in another way than they do in lab situations. We saw in our experiment that people naturally avoided contact with the robot, by changing their path a bit, while in the lab-setting experiments the people stayed in the place they were asked to stand and let the robot approach.
On Thursday and Friday we did experiments with a guide robot that gave a short tour through the halls of Charles V. In between the sessions we made small changes in the robot behavior and spoken content. Preliminary results indicate that a robot is not given any personal space (based on the diagram of Hall); lots of people tend to stand very close to the robot. This is different from the behavior visitors show when following a human tour guide, then they usually keep a distance from 1.5-2.5 meters from the guide. Also, we found that human behavior of following the robot varies, some people stand meters away and turn a bit when the robot is driving to the next stop, while others follow the robot right behind it. When visitors are following human tour guides, they will never stand that far away, and also not follow the guide that close, but the visitors show they are a group and walk with the guide in the direction the guide indicated to go.
People tend to look where the robot is looking, however indications in the spoken text may help to indicate where people should look. This indicates that pointing the attention of the visitors by speech only is not sufficient.
All experiments are videotaped and will be analyzed on human behavior, e.g. how do people react to the robot, what formations do people form around the robot, how do people follow the robot, at what points do people leave the robot tour, how can the robot get their attention? Answers to these questions will help to form guidelines about robot behavior.