Technical Methods for Social Robots in Museum Settings: An Overview of the Literature

Robots have become increasingly present in our daily lives, and we see several settings wherein this technology might positively impact people. One of these settings, and the focus of this paper, is the museum. This paper provides an overview of the literature on how robots can help people within the museum context and explores the state-of-the-art methods or technologies employed by researchers to allow robots to interact within this environment. Five key features were found to be essential to integrate into social museum robots: social navigation (including safe and successful motions); perception (how robots can use visual skills to understand the environment); speech (verbal communication with visitors); gestures (non-verbal cues) and behavior generation (how the robot combines the four skills to adopt different behaviors). The paper subsequently analyzes the integration of these features into robotic systems for a complete and appropriate collection of behaviors in the museum setting.