feat: taxi demo

[maciejmajek]

Purpose

This PR introduces a new taxi demo example showcasing RAI's adaptability to new platforms and use cases.

Story:
It's 2026
You've just hailed an autonomous taxi.
You get in and tell the taxi where you would like to go.

• You don't need to know the address, you can describe where you would like to go or ask for suggestions (e.g. best restaurant in Warsaw)

Proposed Changes

• Adds a new taxi demo example

Issues

• Links to relevant issues

Testing

Important

This demo expects Tavily api key as well as google maps api key. You can contact me for these

Silent testing
Terminal 1

python examples/taxi-demo.py

Terminal 2

ros2 topic echo /to_human std_msgs/msg/String

Terminal 3

ros2 topic pub /from_human std_msgs/msg/String "data: 'The tallest building in the warsaw please'" --once --qos-durability transient_local --qos-reliability reliable

Alternatively
Terminal 1

python examples/taxi-demo.py

Terminal 2

ros2 launch rai_bringup voice.launch.py keep_speaker_busy:=false recording_device:=3 silence_grace_period:=0.5 asr_vendor:=whisper 

[adamdbrw]

Looking through this PR, it is mostly not about a particular use-cases, but some refactoring. Could we make it a 2 separate PRs where one is only the demo?

[maciejmajek]

@adamdbrw Good call. Here is the refactoring PR: #256. Here is feature PR: #257

[boczekbartek]

Errors:

• Please install it with pip install googlemaps.
• faiss error:

(rai-py3.12) robo-pc-005 ➜  12_rai git:(feat/taxi-demo) ✗ python examples/taxi-demo.py                                 
[WARN] [1727767323.981294829] [taxi_demo_node]: Robot description package not set, using empty identity and constitution.
[ERROR] [1727767323.981615142] [taxi_demo_node]: Could not load FAISS index from robot description package. Error: 
'' is not a valid package name

• I tried:

ros2 topic pub /from_human std_msgs/msg/String "data: 'The tallest building in the warsaw please'" --once --qos-durability transient_local --qos-reliability reliable
ros2 topic pub /from_human std_msgs/msg/String "data: 'Nice park close to the city center'" --once --qos-durability transient_local --qos-reliability reliable
ros2 topic pub /from_human std_msgs/msg/String "data: 'A park close to the WUT'" --once --qos-durability transient_local --qos-reliability reliable
ros2 topic pub /from_human std_msgs/msg/String "data: 'A park with a ski lift in warsaw'" --once --qos-durability transient_local --qos-reliability reliable
ros2 topic pub /from_human std_msgs/msg/String "data: 'A big green area close to warsaw university of technology'" --once --qos-durability transient_local --qos-reliability reliable
ros2 topic pub /from_human std_msgs/msg/String "data: 'A big green area close to warsaw university of technology with field word in the name'" --once --qos-durability transient_local --qos-reliability reliable
ros2 topic pub /from_human std_msgs/msg/String "data: 'pole mokotowskie'" --once --qos-durability transient_local --qos-reliability reliable
ros2 topic pub /from_human std_msgs/msg/String "data: 'The headquarters of robotec.ai'" --once --qos-durability transient_local --qos-reliability reliable

Besides failing to get the park close to WUT as Pole Mokotowskie it worked very well!

[maciejmajek]

@boczekbartek thank you for testing.
I've added the googlemaps to the poetry environment.

I wasn't planning on doing anything with the faiss error. It's caused by the lack of whoami configuration package for the taxi demo.
I see two solutions:

• Lower the severity of this error to warn (just like with identity and constitution)
• Create a whoami package for the taxi demo -> this will add a new command that will have to be run for the demo to work

[boczekbartek]

@maciejmajek Thank you for updating. LGTM!