Joe Historybot (1999) by Illah Nourbakhsh, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. Joe Historybot worked at the Heinz History Center for two years, covering over 160 km on its guided tours. It has touchscreen and speech generation interfaces, and offers a range of quizzes to museum visitors.
"The Mobot Museum Robot series of robots, comprised of four robots deployed and tested sequentially over a five-year period [Chips, Sweetlips, Joe Historybot, Adam 40-80], forms a basis for observations about the evolution of public, social robots. The goals of these robot installations were unchanging: deployment of mobile robots in museum spaces that bring about compelling and fruitful interactions between the robots, human visitors and the exhibits in the space. Yet, with the redesign of subsequent robots significant trends were identified by the authors pertaining to lessons learned with each deployment. …
The third robot, Joe Historybot, sported a touch screen, offering not only customized tours, but also secondary information about the space (e.g. location of other exhibits and the restrooms). Furthermore, this robot provided, not unidirectional tours but rather a series of puzzles and questions along the tour paths, encouraging the visitors to stay engaged and challenged throughout the tour process." – A Survey of Socially Interactive Robots: Concepts, Design, and Applications, by Terrence Fong, Illah Nourbakhsh, and Kerstin Dautenhahn
