RoboX at Expo.02: A large-scale installation of personal robots

In this paper we present Robox, a mobile robot designed for operation in a mass exhibition and the experience we made with its installation at the Swiss National Exhibition Expo.02. Robox is a fully autonomous mobile platform with unique multi-modal interaction capabilities, a novel approach to global localization using multiple Gaussian hypotheses, and a powerful obstacle avoidance. Eleven Robox ran for 12 hours daily from May 15 to October 20, 2002, traveling more than 3315 km and interacting with 686,000 visitors. © 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.