Interactive Tele-Presence in Exhibitions through Web-operated Robots

The current paper presents techniques that facilitate mobile robots to be deployed as interactive agents in populated environments, such as museum exhibitions or trade shows. The mobile robots can be teleoperated over the Internet and this way provide remote access to distant users. Throughout this paper we describe several key techniques that have been developed in the context of relevant EU-IST projects. The developed robotic systems have been installed and extensively operated in the premises of various sites. The use of the above techniques, combined with appropriate authoring tools, has resulted in drastic reduction in the installation times. Such demonstrations ascertain the functionality and reliability of our methods and provide evidence regarding the effectiveness of the complete systems.