Abstract—We present a novel robotic telepresence platform
composed by a semi-autonomous mobile robot based on a cloud
robotics framework, which has been developed with the aim
of enabling mobility impaired people to enjoy museums and
archaeological sites that would be otherwise inaccessible. Such
places, in fact, very often are not equipped to provide access for
mobility impaired people, in particular because these aids require
dedicated infrastructures that may not fit within the environment
and large investments. For this reason, people affected by mobility
impairments are often unable to enjoy a part or even the entire
museum experience. Solutions allowing mobility impaired people
to enjoy museum experience are often based on recorded tours,
thus they do not allow active participation of the user. On the
contrary, the presented platform is intended to allow users to
enjoy completely the museum round. A robot equipped with a
camera is placed within the museum and users can control it in
order to follow predefined tours or freely explore the museum.
Our solution ensures that users see exactly what the robot is seing
in real-time. The cloud robotics platform controls both navigation
capabilities and teleoperation. Navigation tasks are intended to
let the robot reliably follow pre-defined tours, while main concern
of teleoperation tasks is to ensure robot safety (e.g., by means
of dynamic obstacle detection and avoidance software). Proposed
platform has been optimized to maximize user experience.