KeJia robot–an attractive shopping mall guider

Abstract

This paper reports the project of a shopping mall guide robot, named KeJia, which is designed for customer navigation, information providing and entertainment in a real environment. Our introduction focuses on the designs of robot’s hardware and software, faced challenges and the multimodal interaction methods including using a mobile phone app. In order to adapt the current localization and navigation techniques to such large and complex shopping mall environment, a series of related improvements and new methods are proposed. The robot is deployed in a large shopping mall for field test and stable operation for a fairly long time. The result demonstrates the stability, validity and feasibility of this robot system, and gives a positive reward to our original design motivation.