Development of Tour-Guide Robot System at Theme Park using Quasi-Zenith Satellite System

Over the past decades, 3D jobs (dangerous, dirty, demanding) are expected to be replaced by autonomous robots. At a theme park, surveillance, cleaning, and guiding tasks can be regarded as 3D jobs. This paper aims to develop an autonomous tour guide robot system at a large theme park. One of the characteristics of the tour guide robot we developed is the use of QZSS (quasi-zenith satellite system) and CLAS (centimeter level augmentation service), which realizes the centimeter-level positioning for autonomous service robots. We also implemented autonomous tour-guide system including path planning, collision avoidance, and voice explanation. Experimental results at the theme park showed that QZSS has sufficient localization accuracy for the tour-guide task, and the tour-guide experiment was successfully carried out.