The robot, named Minerva after the Roman goddess of wisdom and invention, will lead visitors on a tour of the museum's "Material World" exhibition, which contains more than 400 hand-crafted and machine-made artifacts illustrating how materials such as wood, metals and synthetics have influenced the way we live. As part of the tour, Minerva will relate her own components to artifacts in the exhibition.

Minerva's appearance at NMAH is sponsored by the museum's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, which is dedicated to exploring invention in history and encouraging creativity in young people.

Minerva can detect the presence of people, approach them and invite them to join her for a tour. She'll stop at several displays and comment on their contents. Visitors can attract Minerva's attention by clapping their hands or by pressing a touch-sensitive screen attached to her body.

She is equipped with computers, sensors, laser range finders and a module that enables her to avoid collisions, circumvent unexpected obstacles and interact with people. She can perceive her environment and learn about various aspects of it, just like people do. Minerva will be able to express her emotions through her red mouth, which smiles and pouts, and her movable, blue "Velcro" eyebrows.

Minerva's body was built by Real World Interface, Inc., of Jaffrey, N.H. University scientists have created the software that gives her the intelligence and other capabilities to interact with people and operate in the museum environment.

"The purpose of this demonstration is to introduce people to a new generation of intelligent robots," said Sebastian Thrun, assistant professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon. In the past, robots were inflexible, predominantly employed on assembly lines and in factory settings. An intelligent service robot like Minerva is a new phenomenon, with implications for recreation, education, health care, janitorial services, surveillance and entertainment.

"Robots are beginning to make an impact on more than industry and science," Thrun added. "They're beginning to make an impact on our everyday lives."

Thrun is one of a team of 11 researchers who collaborated to develop Minerva. Others at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science include post doctoral researcher Dieter Fox, robotics and computer science graduate students Nicholas Roy, Charles Rosenberg and Frank Dellaert, robot maintainer Greg Armstrong and research programmer Jamie Schulte. Their colleagues from the University of Bonn include Wolfram Burgard, a research scientist in the Computer Science Department, and computer science graduate students Dirk Schulz, Dirk Haehnel and Maren Bennewitz.

This same team developed Minerva's predecessor, Rhino, one of the world's first tour guide robots, which was installed at the Deutsches Museum in Bonn in 1997.

Visitors to the National Museum of American History will have an opportunity to meet some of the researchers at a special "Meet the Inventors" program in the "Information Age" Theater (NMAH, first floor) at 10:30 a.m., Thursday, Aug. 27.

In addition, Minerva will be accessible on the World Wide Web, giving virtual, after-hours tours of the "Material World" exhibition at http://www.si.edu/lemelson/minerva.htm.

The Lemelson Center at the National Museum of American History was established in 1995 with a gift from the Lemelson Foundation, a private philanthropic organization founded by inventor Jerome Lemelson. Lemelson, who died in 1997, was one of America~s most prolific inventors. In his lifetime, he received more than 500 patents for inventions relating to robotics, machine vision, the videocassette recorder, fax machine and cordless telephone.

Computer science researchers at Carnegie Mellon helped to found the field of artificial intelligence in the late 1950s. They have done seminal work in speech recognition. Their research in computer chess ultimately culminated in the defeat of world chess champion Gary Kasparov to IBM's Deep Blue computer in 1997. The university's program in robotics began in 1980. Today, the Robotics Institute is one of the largest endeavors of its kind in the world with an annual budget of more than $20 million. Earlier this year, Robotics Institute researchers introduced a tour guide robot named Chips at the Dinosaur Hall of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Chips is now a permanent part of that exhibit.