To celebrate Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary in 2008, Carnegie Mellon University is trying to place dozens of robots along the North Shore, Downtown and Oakland as part of a $1.25 million effort called "Robot 250." Expect to see robotic art installations, student-made robots and robots on loan from local companies with "robo-tours" and robot "block parties" as promotional hooks.

To be clear, the automatons are not necessarily going to look like "movie robots," cautioned Dennis Bateman, project director for The Robotics Institute at CMU. Nor will they roam the streets touting the region's virtues -- "wel-come-to-the-most-live-a-ble-ci-ty-in-the-U-S-A."

"We want people to realize robots are part of their daily life," Mr. Bateman added. "It's not the future. It's already here."

This probably rules out a resurrection of ELEKTRO, a clunky, 7-foot-tall, walking, talking robot built by Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse Electric Corp. in the 1930s. ELEKTRO smoked cigarettes, blew up balloons and talked with a voice recorded on 78 RPM records, using a vocabulary of more than 700 words. It made its first public appearance at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, toured the country as a Westinghouse appliance promotion in 1950 and later appeared as "Thinko" in the 1960 movie "Sex Kittens Go To College." One of its better known phrases was: "My brain is bigger than yours."

ELEKTRO represents the beginning of Pittsburgh's history as a robot research center -- the first testing at Westinghouse began in the 1920s. Three dozen robotics companies now operate from southwestern Pennsylvania, according to CMU, and the reputation of CMU's Robotics Center earned the city the title of "Roboburgh" from The Wall Street Journal in 1999.

"Robot 250" was the idea of CMU robotics professor Illah Nourbakhsh, who wanted the project to coincide with an array of initiatives being planned for Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary -- everything from a renovation of Point State Park to a Forbes Road travel guide to a reunion campaign.

Mr. Nourbakhsh and the Robotics Institute have raised $100,000 from The Heinz Endowments to plan their project, and they have another $300,000 request before the Heinz board, which will consider the project next week. Heinz, the region's second-largest philanthropy, declined comment. If CMU gets the $300,000, it hopes for a second matching grant next year -- meaning Heinz would fund about half of all project costs.

Heinz is also the source of $1 million provided to Andy Warhol Museum director Tom Sokolowski to build long-lasting works of Pittsburgh-related art for the anniversary celebration and $500,000 for renovations to Point State Park.

The Allegheny Conference on Community Development remains the big organizer of 250th anniversary events and a 175-person Pittsburgh 250 commission. It is trying to raise $10 million and is more than halfway to its goal, according to Bill Flanagan, an executive vice president for the nonprofit business booster group.

The $1.25 million needed for "Robot 250" would support 50 teams of students and coaches working in 10 different parts of the city to develop functional robots. Of the 50 prototypes, 20 will be produced and displayed in museums next summer. The money also would back a show of 15 robotic art installations or performances in parks, civic squares, waterfronts and theaters; the development of working robots at four different "open studios" around the region; and the display of bomb-detecting or medicine-dispensing robots already in use by local companies at "public sites" around the Pittsburgh area.

The teams and artists could come up with a new mechanical man, like ELEKTRO, acknowledged Mr. Bateman. But it's more likely that the results will be less "solid," he said, citing as examples the robotic sensors that change colors based on pollution levels, cameras that can find people in crowds based on the color of their clothing, mechanical flowers programmed to wilt with a drop in the stock market and a "water skipper" made of metal and feathers that can propel itself around a lake or pond.

"We want to surprise people," Mr. Bateman said.