#mobot

the pitt | abbot/mohan | 27k | explicit

I enjoyed a walking tour with a garden docent, and the sun set while on the tour. There's this great sculpture exhibition there through September called Patterns in Nature. Everything is lit up, but you don't notice it until after dark.

Here are some photographs I took this evening, including most under the cut.

Chips AKA Sage (1998) by Illah Nourbakhsh, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, with Redzone Robotics. Chips is a modified Nomad XR4000 robot installed in the Dinosaur Hall at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History as a full-time autonomous member of the staff, providing educational content to museum visitors. Working at the museum until 2002, it traveled more than 500 km within the museum halls, regularly auto-docking at its charging station. It generated so much interest that a new company, Mobot, was created to commercialize the robot.

"In May 1998, the country’s first robotic tour guide debuted in Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Dinosaur Hall. While robots had walked inside active volcanoes and bumped against rocks on Mars, none had yet done the risky work of dodging a museum full of kids. “People, as it turns out, are really hard to avoid,” Illah Nourbakhsh, professor of robotics and director of the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, said at the time. But Chips, a 400-pound robot-turned-museum-docent, was prepared when curious kids and their grown-ups flocked to it. It safely moved to predetermined locations among the fossil giants, stopping if an excited museumgoer got in its path, and delivered 15-minute prerecorded fast facts about lesser-known but just as fascinating features of the hall such as its aquatic dinosaurs. Resembling an upright steel drum on wheels, Chips wasn’t flashy, but its tummy doubled as a video screen and it took daily lunch breaks, the first robot to plug itself into the wall and “eat” electricity." – Closer Look: Meet Chips, the MoBot Prototype, Carnegie Museums.

The first thing that Samira says to Abbot when she first sees him at the conference meet-and-greet drinks is, unfortunately, “Please be my boyfriend.” To his credit, Abbot’s expression barely changes. He just watches her, like he’s waiting for the rest of it to make sense, which, fair. “Please pretend to be my boyfriend,” Samira amends, very aware that she sounds like she’s about six years old and on a school playground.

Getting some beauty tips from Mobot