Experiences in using the pepper robotic platform for museum assistance applications

This paper presents the software architecture of a robotic museum guide application called Cuma. It is intended to run upon the Pepper robotic platform and has the objective of guiding visitors of a museum accompanying them in the tour, explaining museum works, and interacting with them in order to gather feedback. Cuma has been partially implemented and preliminarily tested. The results reported in the paper, highlight that even if Pepper, from the structural point of view, seems particularly suited for this kind of application, the provided software platform presents some important limitations thus requiring the integration of external tools and algorithms.