A robotic museum guide was constructed during the European research project Indigo, in which Athens University of Economics and Business participated with its Department of Informatics
The Natural Language Processing Group of AUEB's Department of Informatics participated in the
European research project INDIGO (Information Society Technologies - Interaction with Personality and Dialogue Enabled Robots), which developed technology for users to
interact with mobile robots. The project's technology combines methods from robotics, computational vision, natural language processing, knowledge representation and inference etc.
AUEB's Department of Informatics developed methods that allow the robot to describe exhibits in different languages from information in an OWL ontology of the Semantic Web. The description is automatically tailored to the users' age and their
interaction history (e.g., previously seen exhibits). The robot is able to vary the intonation of its voice, to use appropriate facial expressions, to turn to the exhibits it describes or compares to, as well as to understand and answer spoken questions
related to the exhibits.
The project was coordinated by the Foundation of Research and Technology - Hellas. The project's
consortium included research centres and universities from several countries.
