Interactive Communication Robot Handling Crowd Management and Content Delivery in Museums Employing Crowd Counting

ABSTRACT

Through the last decade, and particularly after the Covid period (2020 - 2022), crowd counting and localization have attracted much attention of AI researchers due to its potential applicability in crowd monitoring and control, public safety, space design, interactive content delivery etc. Once delivery objectives for a system are envisaged and the premises are fixed, we can always construct manifold technology architecture that delivers the set goals. However, in the Indian context a solution of choice needs to be optimized on frugality and ease of adaptability. In this paper we report an economic and replicable application of crowd counting and interactive content delivery in museums through unbiased knowledge systems embedded in robotic museum assistants. We intend to demonstrate a robotic system that can deliver any gallery content to groups of visitors keeping special focus on the exhibits that are popular choices. Crowd counting is used here to enable the content presentation to a group of choice in an interactive way. There are some market-ready solutions available for interactive gallery demonstration by moveable robots but they require not only huge capital investment but are also of limited use within controlled environments. Our proposed design is to multiplex an existing infrastructure of surveillance system as a smart crowd counting and gallery demonstration system along with crowd management with minimum additional hardware infusion. © 2023 IEEE.