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Robot will escort visitors in natural history museum
Friday, May 22, 1998 By Byron Spice, Science Editor, Post-Gazette
Robots have worked inside crippled nuclear reactors, walked inside active volcanoes, and last summer bumped against rocks on Mars. Now a robot is venturing someplace even more hazardous:
A museum full of kids.
"People, it turns out, are really hard to avoid," said Illah Nourbakhsh, an assistant professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University.
He has led development this spring of a still-unnamed robot that will be unveiled today at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. A joint project of the museum, Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and Redzone Robotics Inc., the country's first robotic tour guide will lead visitors on multimedia tours of Dinosaur Hall.
The project marks a number of firsts, Nourbakhsh said, but nothing has been so challenging or important as making sure the 400-pound robot doesn't roll over a little boy's foot or pin an old lady against the wall.
"We've been testing it with little children and it's very good at avoiding them," Nourbakhsh said. "It's very safe."
The museum these days is awash with pupils on end-of-year field trips. Elementary pupils have swarmed around the machine during its testing without incident.
It's not the robot's looks that are attracting them. Resembling nothing so much as a steel drum on wheels, or perhaps an old tub washer with a computer screen screwed on instead of a wringer. It will never be mistaken for the anthropomorphic robots with arms and legs so popular in science fiction.
By the time it debuts today, however, museum officials promise to dress up the steel drum with a helmet and a red bow tie so that it more closely resembles a steel drum that is a dork.
The 4-foot-tall robot is encircled by two rows of sonar devices that use sound pulses to detect obstacles. Bumpers on the cylindrical sides will immobilize the robot if anything presses against it.
But survival amid the Apatosaurus and Tyrannasaurus rex skeletons of Dinosaur Hall will require smarts as well as sensors. Elementary pupils, Nourbakhsh said, tend to be mesmerized and follow the robot obediently. But teens are forever placing their baseball caps over the color video camera the robot uses to navigate, or purposely getting in its way.
"They push the envelope," he said. "They look for its weaknesses."
So if the robot encounters somebody in its path, it is trained not to maneuver around him. That could quickly become a game as wiseacres keep moving into its path, trying to steer it into trouble. Instead, the robot simply stops when something is in its path. It will ask somebody to move and may try to spur movement by inching up gradually, but it never goes around.
Robey don't play that game.
"You want it to be pretty stubborn," Nourbakhsh said. A person gets bored with inaction; the robot never does.
But is it any good as a tour guide?
That remains to be seen. For now, the robot displays photos and graphics on its computer screen and plays recorded narration and other sounds through its speakers. It continually moves around Dinosaur Hall, stopping at the same spots each time, spouting the same information.
"It's just the beginning of what will be a new technology that could be used in a lot of ways," said Sandra Lepri, a museum spokeswoman. None of the museum's docents need worry soon about their positions, she acknowledged.
Yet people are curious about this odd fellow (gal? sea scallop?). As they try to figure out what all its blinking green lights have to do with extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous Age, they may end up looking at exhibits they would otherwise ignore, such as the aquatic dinosaur called the mosasaur whose skeleton is mounted on one wall, Nourbakhsh said.
Also, he emphasized that the robot was a work in progress that would become progressively more sophisticated over the next three years. A hundred days ago, he said, the project didn't even exist.
Museum director Jay Apt had been talking with Carnegie Mellon's robotics experts since he assumed his post last year. Three months ago, William "Red" Whittaker, who heads up the Field Robotics Laboratory, came to Nourbakhsh and asked if a robot could be made reliable enough and safe enough to be let loose in a museum. The robot now puttering around the Dinosaur Hall is the answer of Nourbakhsh and three of his students.
Part of a $1 million grant to the museum by the Richard King Mellon Foundation accounts for much of the project funding, Lepri said.
By the end of the summer, Nourbakhsh promises, the robot will be able to sense the presence of visitors, ask questions -- "Have you seen the Camarasaurus? No? I'll take you there." -- and begin to tailor its presentations.
Someday, special lighting may be installed in Dinosaur Hall that can be controlled by the robot. While talking about T. rex, for instance, the robot might be able to douse all the lights save those focused on the carnivorous dinosaur, while letting loose a roar through its speakers.
For the first few weeks, Nourbakhsh anticipates, the robot will need plenty of attention to keep it running. But it's designed to be unsupervised. Eventually, it may run for weeks without needing any human intervention.
"If it works here," he said as a group of schoolchildren filed by, "it will work anywhere."
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