The design and implementation of Alan Touring, the Campus Tourbot

Abstract

Alan Touring, the Campus Tourbot, is a robotic tour-guide/tourist robot for parts of the MIT campus. Work on the robot began in January 2006, and for the past 31 months, I have devoted thousands of hours to designing, implementing, and testing the robot. This thesis describes the hardware and software systems created for the robot, performs an evaluation of the robot's functionality, and discusses the public's reactions to the robot when they encountered it driving through their world. As with any robotic system, the development of the Tourbot involved trial-and-error. A critique of some major design decisions that were made and how these decisions affected the development of the robot is performed. Suggestions for how the development process could have been improved based on lessons that I learned are then offered.