A Development of Automatic Self-Ordering Following Module for Online Campus Tour Project of 5 Countries

Recently, Covid-19 pandemic has introduced some disturbances in the transportation industry. As a result, some university students are now participating in online internship programs. In our laboratory, we proposed an online campus tour project where each foreign student teleoperates with a robot. The robot prepared is outfitted with a camera, laser range finder sensor, and a mobile monitor to represent the student's physical appearance. The robots and foreign students are connected through the university's internal network. During the tour, we found some flaws and improvements in the current system. Because of the time delay and other difficulties, some students are not able to follow the campus tour project at the same pace as the others. Consequently, a distributed module for automated following features with dynamic order is proposed. The following order is determined by the location of each robot. The proposed module combines ROS Navigation Stack and a novel method of robot formation. In this study, the proposed improvement is evaluated and discussed.