Tritonbot: First Lessons Learned From Deployment Of A Long-Term Autonomy Tour Guide Robot

Service robots perform flawless demos while their developers are keeping a close eye, but they often fail when working autonomously, especially in a long-term deployment. To study failure modes and human-robot interaction patterns in long-term deployments, we built TritonBot, a long-term autonomy robot working as a building receptionist and a tour guide. It recognizes people's face, talks to them, and guides people to the labs and facilities in an office building. This paper presents the design of TritonBot and the lessons we learned from the first-month deployment with respect to technical and human-robot interaction aspects. TritonBot and its variant BoxBot have worked for 108.7 hours, actively interacted with people for 22.1 hours, greeted people 2950 times, guided 150 tours, and traveled 9.9 kilometers. We share the components of TritonBot using an open licence to help the community to replicate the TritonBot platform and inspire long-term autonomy and human-robot interaction research.