An affective mobile robot educator with a full-time job

Sage is a robot that has been installed at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History as a full-time autonomous member of the staff. Its goal is to provide educational content to museum visitors in order to augment their museum experience. This paper discusses all aspects of the related research and development. The functional obstacle avoidance system, which departs from the conventional occupancy grid-based approaches, is described. Sage's topological navigation system, using only color vision and odometric information, is also described. Long-term statistics provide a quantitative measure of performance over a nine month trial period. The process by which Sage's educational content and personality were created and evaluated in collaboration with the museum's Divisions of Education and Exhibits is explained. Finally, the ability of Sage to conduct automatic long-term parameter adjustment is presented. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.