The National Museum of Australia will trial a mobile robot as a way of facilitating more student visitors to the institution. Around 90,000 students visit the museum each year, but Australia has more than four million students across all tiers of education. Most are at least 300 km from the Museum's Canberra home, The Register reports.
The Museum and Australia’s government research house, the CSIRO, received AUD$2.4m of cash for the project, which will commence in October 2012 and is designed to overcome the tyranny of distance while also exploring how technology can make cultural institutions more accessible.
While each camera captures 30 frames per second, and while they do so at just 1024×768 images the spherical lens employed offers more verisimilitude than a conventional camera. The project will take images from the five Ladybugs mounted horizontally atop the bot’s central stalk and aggregate them into a single image that simulates an in-museum stroll by a real person.
Other equipment on the bot will include an 802.11g widget to hook up to the Museum’s newly-installed campus-wide WLAN, plus a small form factor PC to handle general processing chores. A screen on the bot will capture video from virtual visitors, so they can interact with museum guides. 12 volt batteries will help the ‘bot to roll around.
The precise details of just how tours will work and how interactions with guides will take place are being worked out, but both Dave Arnold (the Musuem’s Manager, Education) and Jonathan Roberts (Research Director at CSIRO’s Autonomous Systems Laboratory) are emphatic that the robot won’t replace human guides. Indeed, both believe the bot will work best when accompanied by a human guide, as the presence of a person familiar with exhibits will mean virtual visitors can inquire about what they are seeing as they make their online tours of the facility.
